Making Mozzarella

We want our  Children's Home  to produce as much food as is cost effective, so we're always ready to try a new project and see what we can make ourselves.  

Now that we have cows we're milking everyday, we're starting to experiment with making our own cheese.

We want to show you the process of when we made some of our first  mozzarella.  This is Jason working with our young friend Noah who was visiting.  When Noah heard we were going to make our own cheese, he started learning how and his family helped get us some of the cheese making supplies we needed (thank you!).

Our recipe is from the  Home Cheese Making   book, called 30-minute mozzarella.

You take a gallon of milk and stir in citric acid (dissolved in water) while the milk is 55F.  Then you heat the milk to 90F on the stove and add rennet (diluted in water).  Both citric acid and rennet help the milk to coagulate.  

Once your milk gets thick like custard you cut it into small uniform pieces in your pot, so the whey can drain from the curd.  Then you put it back on the stove and heat to 105F.  

Next you remove the curds from the whey (or in other words, remove your lumps of cheese from the liquid) and put it in a microwavable bowl. 

Now you're ready to put the cheese in the microwave (who would have thought!) and heat it for 1 min.  You then drain off the extra whey and starting kneading your cheese like bread.  Go back to the microwave then two more times (for 35 sec each time) and more kneading.  Add some salt and knead some more.  

The cheese is done when you can stretch it like taffy.  Roll it into balls and cool them quickly in ice water, if you can resist eating it warm.  

Jason and Noah also experimented with adding some sun dried tomatoes and pesto to their cheese too and it was really tasty!

So, as you can see, it's definitely a process to make mozzarella, but I'm sure once we practice more it will totally be worth it.  We've learned that once you take the mystery out of home food production, and you practice your recipe a few times, it's really not as complicated as you'd think.

Our idea is to make this cheese about once a month.  We'll also make a yogurt cheese (like cream cheese) and a typical Honduran cheese called cuajada  on a weekly basis.  Between these cheeses, and maybe a few other experiments along the way, we can produce almost all of our own cheese.

Anyone for homemade pizza??