Midnight Mozeralla!

Simple to make, but hard to get it right.... that seems to be the consensus for mozzarella.
A few inspiring quotes from cheesemaking forums


"I'm new to cheese.  I've tried mozzarella twice and both failed."

"Having a horrible time getting moz cheese to work." 

"We have 2 failed attempts of trying to make mozzarella and ending up with something like ricotta."

There's also a bazillion different recipes.  The dozens we looked at ranged from 30 minutes to 2 days for start to finish.  The ingredients also varied quite a bit

• Some call for started cultures, others do not
• Some call for calcium chloride, others do not
• Most use citric acid, a few did not.  Timing of adding this ingredient also varied.
• A few called for Lipase Powder
• Some recipes brought milk up to temperature with direct heat to the pot, others required a double boiler.  Alternative's included using the kitchen sink as a double boiler.
• Some recipes used the microwave to treat the curds, others used water or whey.

Bottom line, there are tons of ways to do this and presumably a lot of different opportunities to mess it up!  This is bit daunting for someone who has a tough time moving onto to something new without dialing it in first.  Glass half empty side is thinking its going to take countless times to get right.  Glass half full side is thinking that's the fun part anyway.  Either way, low expectations yield generous flexibility on the self assessment scale!  We started late and then it took us 2 hours to pick a recipe...thus the namesake.

Ingredient availability helped choose the recipe. 

Supplies we used
Stainless Steel Pot ( 6 Quarts)
Makeshift Double Boiler (using Lobster pot and a small bacon rack)
Colender
Spoon
Knife to cut the curds
Thermometer ( Cheese-making thermometer and Thermapen)

Ingredients
1 Gallon Whole Milk (Oakhurst Store-bought pasteurized and homogenized)
1.25 teaspoon Citric Acid
1.25 teaspoon liquid rennet (We used animal rennet)
.5 cup of water
Kosher salt

The end result did not exactly look and feel like mozzarella. Everything seemed to be going well until it was time to treat, stretch, and shape the curds. The curds never became completely uniform and the stretch that you think of with mozzarella never really happened.  That being said, it tasted fresh but just a little bit "grainy." I feel confident that not unknowing taste testers would identify the cheese correctly... so there's that!


Here's how it went down

Step 1) Poured  the Milk into Stainless Steel Pot. Milk was 55 degrees.
Step 2) Mixed Citric Acid in .25 Cups water until it dissolved.  Added this to the unheated milk and stirred.
Step 3) Brought Milk to 89 degrees in makeshift double boiler.  12 minutes to bring to temp

 

The Clam Broth Drain ended up working great for maintaining temperature throughout the process.  Draining water and adding hot/cold water back in as needed.

Step 4) Once Temp reached 89, removed from heat.

Step 5) Mixed rennet in .25 cup of water and added to milk.  Stirred with up and down motion for 10 seconds. Covered and left alone for 15 minutes to coagulate. After 15 minutes I was half expecting nothing to have happened.  Upon lifting the lid everything seemed to be in order.  Pushing a finger in and lifting it up, the curd cleanly broke over the finger just as some of the recipe's said should happen.

Step 6) Cut the curd into 1 inch cubes.  We were not sure how much the size played into the end result. Let the curds alone to rest for 10 minutes

Curds just after cutting

Curds after resting for 10 minutes

Step 7) Put the pot with the curds back in the double boiler and brought to 108 degrees.  Maintained this for 35 minutes stirring every 5-10 minutes.  NOTE:  The temp got as high as 116 at one point, but for the most part was within 3 degrees of the range... if anything slightly higher than 108 the whole time.  The Thermapen was far more dependable than the cheese-making thermometer.

This was taken towards the end of the 35 minutes holding at 108 degrees. We questioned if we had cut the curds too small.

Step 8) Drained the cured in a colander lined with cheesecloth and let sit for 15 minutes

Step 10: Treating the curds.  We used the microwave for this.  Up until this point everything seemed good. There was about about 2.5 cups of curds and we treated in 3 batches,
taking almost a cup worth

• Mixed in a little less than .5 teaspoon salt per cup of curds
• heated in microwave for 50 second
• worked with a spoon to mix curds together. 
• heated again in microwave for 25 seconds
• worked with spoon/hands

This is when things did not seem to be working out as planed.  Stretching the curds was never really an option.  The curds did form into a uniform shape, but never got shiny or had a firm stretch quality... and the consistency was not exactly uniform either.  After reading up on this, my thought was that it was not acidic enough.  We did not have a way to test ph.

You can see the consistency is not uniform.  It's not exactly grainy... but not exactly mozzarella looking either

Step 11: Formed into ball shapes, put it cold water briefly, and then wrapped and into the fridge.

Enough cheese for Pizza night and Tomato/Basel/Mozzarella snacks all week!