Cheesy Attempt

Hells, yeah, it's CHEESE DAY!!!

PeterE and I are getting our cheese on and it's going to be awesome. He brings over a large pot and some other gear and we get to shopping. I've got the rennet (enzyme) we need to make the milk gel, but we need active culture buttermilk to acidify it as well.

The mozzarella process we're looking to do takes about 12-14 hours, and while researching we find a 60-minute version that looks easy enough as long as we can find some citric acid.

This proves to be more difficult than you might think. We go to a few stores and can't find anything. There's plenty of ascorbic acid, but not citric. In the end, I remember seeing some in the Safeway and we track it down. It's called "Sour Salt" and made by a Kosher company. Anyone have any idea what it's used for in Jewish cooking?

Well, it's a really simple process from there. We figure this "quick" cheese will be a good warmup for us. Basically, we warm the milk, add the acid, mix in the rennet and wait for it to gel. The curd forms, and we run it through a cloth to get the whey out. We've read that you can use the whey to make ricotta, but decide that we've taken on enough for the day.

Once we have that big lump of curd, you microwave it and knead until it gets shiny and has that mozzarella-y feel to it. Then you round it into balls, and brine it in salt water for a while.

We do this, and leave out salt because the recipe doesn't explicitly call for it, and that's a mistake. We wind up with something reminiscent of mozz, but more like the hard packaged stuff, and definitely without that creamy texture we're looking for.

It's not especially delicious. Some salt would help a lot, and I would might try it again, if only to have a slightly cheaper way of getting mozz for pizza. At about $4/gallon, yielding about a pound of cheese vs. about $6/lb of store-bought, I'll have to see how I feel next time pizza calls to me.