A few tips on making Mozzarella
Posted on | November 4, 2009 | 3 Comments
I know a lot of folks who, like me, love the idea of making mozzarella from scratch. But I also know quite a few people, myself included, who have tried it and failed miserably. This weekend, I think I finally had my mozzarella breakthrough, so of course I had to share it here.
First, the recipe. I have been trying to make Ricki Carroll’s 30-Minute Mozzarella recipe, from her book Home Cheese Making. I love that she recommends local, minimally processed milk, and that her web site has lots of tips and pictures. But my mozzarella curds NEVER looked solid enough to pull back with my fingers or cut with a knife, so I wasn’t really surprised when my cheese kept not turning out.
In the end, I identified two problems. First, I was heating the milk way too quickly. Hey, I have two small children, I don’t have hours to make mozzarella! So I heated it the same way I heat milk for my home-made yogurt, which is far, far too fast and appears to do something to the curds so that they look more like mush and less like a solid, cutable mass. Cooking it on 3 (medium low) out of a possible 10 seems to have done the trick.
My first solid, cutable curd!
Another thing I learned was that if you’re using raw milk or even pasteurized milk that’s fairly fresh from the cow, you might need to add twice the amount of citric acid that the recipe calls for. Citric acid helps adjust the pH of the milk and apparently the pH of our local, organic, grassfed raw milk is a little on the high side for cheese-making.
The one time out of six that I actually successfully made something that resembled mozzarella before this weekend, the result was very dry and not very tasty. So another thing I experimented with this time around was not squeezing as much liquid out of the cheese during the heating and stretching process. Once the liquid went from clearish-yellow (whey) to white, which I assume is just milk fat, I stopped squeezing.
My first successful cheese-making endeavor!
The result was gorgeous. Tasty, melty, stretchy mozzarella. Yum! Hopefully now you can go make 30-minute mozzarella and avoid the pitfalls that I blundered into time and again.
Tags: mozarella > raw milk > Ricki Carroll > The Cheese Queen
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TV is the latest writing endeavor of Julie Artz, who has been blogging about just about anything that comes to her scattered mind since 2002.
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November 5th, 2009 @ 11:44 am
Oooh! I’ve been trying (and failing) at the mozzarella, too. I get my milk from Longmont Dairy, so now I’m wondering if the additional citric acid would help me as well? Last time, I had a good curd and then I think I nuked it too hard in the microwave. I think my MW is stronger than the one they used when they wrote the book. Turned my mozza to ricotta.
So far, I’ve had the best luck with cream cheese, buttermilk, sour cream, yogurt and kefir. All very, very nice. Oh and fromage blanc! This weekend, I’ll try mozza again! Thanks for the tips!
November 5th, 2009 @ 11:54 am
I do think the additional citric acid would help with the Longmont Dairy milk. I also think super-slow-heating will help, because I was having a lot of trouble with my curd holding together too. I’ve tried with both our raw milk and the Longmont Dairy milk in the past and they seem fairly similar in terms of making cheese. Let me know how it goes!
November 5th, 2009 @ 7:43 pm
It made a really nice fromage blanc and french cream cheese. I do cook on med-low heat, since it scorches higher. Tomorrow, maybe. Whee!