Adventures in Cheesemaking
Posted on March 14, 2010 - Filed Under Food, Simple Life | 8 International Amigos Said
Cheese in Guatemala is expensive, particularly the aged stuff. You can get fresh cheese pretty cheap, but nothing of quality. So, yesterday and today, I’ve been trying my hand at cheesemaking, mozzarella, in particular. Here’s how you can make your own, if you’re interested. I followed the recipe here.
I started with 4 liters of fresh milk that was partially skimmed. To speed up the acidity, which is vital in mozzarella and is what makes it stretchy, I put in 1 1/4 tsp. of citric acid (acido citrico in Spanish, available in Farmacia La Roca by Burger King).
Then I heated it to 32° and then added about 1/4 c. fresh yogurt and let it sit for an hour to cool. Then I added half a tablet of rennet (you’re only supposed to use 1/4 tablet, but I was anxious about it working) to about 2 tablespoons of water and stirred it into the cultured milk.
This is what it looked like after about 20 minutes.
You want the curds to give a “clean break” which looks like this . . . a nice split rather than spreading over your finger.
I cut the curd. It was WAY harder than it sounded. For mozzarella, you need pieces that are fairly small, about half an inch. The curd spun and slipped though as I was cutting and was a real pain to cut.
You cut into strips, then cut across and finally, lift with a clean hand and cut everything into cubes. The water gets quite murky and it’s hard to see so you have to actually lift the curds out to cut them. Here’s what they look like at this point.
Pretty squooshy! These are very delicate at this point and will break apart easily, so you have to let them sit for a bit. Five minutes later, they look like this:
At this point, you have to keep stirring the curds because they try to stick back together. I ended up stirring about every 5-10 min for the first 30 min, then I let them sit and mat up on the bottom of the pot, as the recipe said. You also need to keep the milk at 32° or so, which wasn’t hard, I just turned on the stove low a couple of times.
The heat helps the curds expel the whey and they tighten up even more, like so:
The curds get dumped into cheesecloth, but since I didn’t have any, I used a cloth napkin that I had on hand.
Gather up the corners and hang it from a doorknob with a bowl under it to catch the whey.
The recipe says to let it hang for 4 hours, I took it down after 2 because it was getting in my way and wasn’t dripping at all anymore.
Since it was late and the mozzarella needed to develop a little more acidity, I left it in the fridge overnight and the next day, chopped it into small cubes. Looks like cheese already, huh?
This cheese already tasted pretty good, with a little tang that the previous day’s curd really lacked.
I heated water to almost boiling, added a handful of salt and dumped the cubes in.
I checked it frequently to see if the curds were soft. They need to be soft all the way through without being totally melted.
Here the curd was just starting to soften.
And then . . . I thought I’d ruined the whole thing! I scooped the curds out and they ended up melting even more just from their own heat!
Thankfully, it was just right. So all I had to do was stretch the curds. I dipped them back into the water when the strands started to break a bit.
Sorry, didn’t get any decent pics of the stretching, since I was taking my own photos!
Finally, I let the cheese sit in hot water for a few seconds to really get soft, then pressed it into this container.
An hour in the fridge and it looked like real cheese! Tasted like it, too!
Dante
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