UPDATE! MOZZARELLA SUCCESS! Probably a different recipe/method.
I spent 2 weekends looking for non-ultra-pasteurized cream for my first attempt at mozzarella, and I thought I already had non-ultra-pasteurized whole milk (from Whole Foods). I was set – citric acid, check; rennet tablet, check; 1 gallon whole milk, check; 1 cup cream, check.
I did miss one step, which I thought I rectified: dechlorinated water. The author says you can just let water sit out for several hours to dechlorinate it, or you can agitate it in a blender (which I guess allows the chlorine to escape?). I chose the blender method. She even says you can try it with regular tap water but be aware you might not get coagulation. I did get coagulation.
This was right after adding the citric acid, and you can see the bubbly-looking surface indicating the first coagulation.
Here you can see the cheese forming a big curd in the center, with the pale yellow whey around it.
This was when I started the process of cutting the curds and moving them around in the hot whey, per the instructions, waiting for them to change from looking like yogurt to looking like scrambled eggs. It was really disappointing too that after I spooned out the curds into another dish to form the cheese, which became a big milky mess (photo follows), the curds I didn’t take out of the big pot were very tasty and well formed.
You can see this is just a big milky mess! and it never pulled together the way the book showed. I even tried to use cheesecloth to drain it, just as a last ditch effort to salvage something out of a gallon of milk, but no. Lucy loved the milky mess (I only gave her a couple of large spoonfuls as well as some whey) but the rest went into the disposal.
I’m not even going to add a recipe here since this was a complete and total fail. I need to find the time and ingredients again and start over! Two issues, maybe three, come to mind on this – the dechlorinated water (although I got coagulation); the milk might actually have been UP but not designated as such, and I do have a source for definitely non-UP milk now; maybe I was using the wrong utensil to break up and spoon out the curds? Because the issue was, the cheese became curds in the pot but when I spooned them into the other dish and tried to pour off the whey – and they provided a photo, showing the clear/yellowish liquid I get on other cheesemaking attempts – it all became a sort of milky blob in the dish, and that blob was very liquid but pouring it off would mean pouring it all back in the pot – it was no longer separated curds and whey. I might also have jumped the gun on cooking the curds in the whey before spooning them out, although they were well enough formed to do so. My spoon, however, did not drain off much whey. The spoon she uses in the book is different, larger, more slots – I’m grasping at straws here.
Yeah, the handful of curds left in the pot after I finished and before I tossed it were very tasty. Sigh!
No Comments