30 minute mozzarella

This weekend Hanna and Craig came over for Easter...and a variety of cooking experiences. After church today, we got busy starting supper. We started a batch of French bread and mozzarella using the 30 minute recipe from Home Cheese Making.

I have to admit to not following the directions. I used lemon juice instead of citric acid without looking up the ratio, and didn't put in enough. We added the rennet at the right temperature, nothing happened, Hanna looked it up online, we cooled the milk, added more lemon juice (3 ounces total), reheated it, added a few specks more rennet, and carried on reasonably successfully, all things considered.

Also, we'd bought our rennet (and all our current supplies) from Danlac Industries, our nearest cheese making supplier. Their ingredients don't translate straight across, so there was some guess work involved there too. Here Hanna is checking to see if the curds are starting to set.



The answer is yes!



Hanna squeezed out the excess whey:



And then began the process of folding it over and over with a wooden spoon, heating in between times:



Jim had taken about a fifth of the curds to do without salt at all (as an experiment for a family member with kidney disease). Here he is testing the stretchability of the mozz.



Working the cheese makes for hot, red hands!



Here's a bunch of tasty little mozza balls. Turned out pretty decent, if I do say so myself!

Lemon Cheese

We recently purchased the book Home Cheese Making. Today I tried my first recipe out of it, Lemon Cheese (page 79). It seemed a good choice because it doesn't require anything fancy, just milk, lemons, heat, and salt. I was thinking ahead yesterday and purchased some lemons. I juiced two on the glass juicer I got from my grandmother's estate.



I poured half a gallon of whole milk into a large pot and heated it to about 185F, stirring frequently with a whisk.



Then I turned off the heat and poured in 1/3 cup of the lemon juice. Immediately the curds began to separate from the whey:



The lid goes on so it can rest for 15 minutes, then I poured it through cloth in a colander:



Once the whey had poured through (just a few minutes), I tied the cloth into a bag to apply a bit of pressure to it and let it sit for a couple hours draining through the colander on the counter. By then the bread was done and I was getting hungry to try out this cheese, but it needed a bit of salt--I put in 1.5 teaspoons, 1/2 teaspoon at a time and tasting in between.



A little bit of a crumbly texture, but oh-so-delicious on fresh bread. And no, it doesn't taste the teensiest bit of lemon juice!