Cheese

Rachel and I have been wanting to try to make Mozzarella cheese together so we finally worked out a time to try it. It's a very simple process, just a little time consuming if you aren't working on anything else in the meantime. All you do is warm a gallon of milk over the stove, add a little citric acid and rennet (the digestive enzyme which curdles milk), and then wait for the milk to curdle. You wait a few hours while the curds separate from the whey (does that remind you of a certain someone sitting on her tuffett?).

After that stage, you cut the curds into chunks and slowly warm them again. After you drain the cubes with a cheese cloth, you take the curd cubes and place them in a bowl while you pour enough salty boiling water over it just to cover it.

You let the cheese warm a little bit in the salty water and then start trying to form it together into one bowl. You are supposed to used gloves at this point because of the hot water but we didn't have any. Rachel said she read about someone's grandmother who would do it with ice water next to the hot water so she could cool her hands every once in awhile. We ended up doing that which helped. You dump out the water and continue this process with fresh salty water until the cheese has formed the shape you want.
Then you lay the cheese down in a long tube, wrap it in plastic wrap and tie off the size cheese balls you want. At this point you can store the cheese in the plastic or put it back in the salty water to store.
Finally, if you reboil the leftover whey and let it sit, the milk will curdle again and make ricotta cheese!
We found some other recipes for cream cheese and feta that we thought might be fun to try as well.


(Here's a picture of the dessert that I made with the ricotta cheese)
Ricotta with a little vanilla, sugar and lemon zest topped with blueberries, mango and a tiny bit of fresh basil.