Six years ago when I was first married, I found cooking a bit intimidating. My first cookbook that got real use was the Campbell's Soup Cookbook my mom got for me. The recipes were easy and fairly tasty, and a good introduction to cooking for me. (I was comfortable with baking. I grew up helping my mom and grandmothers make cookies and things. It was making food for dinner that was a bit daunting.) Over the years I've gone through phases of more cooking and phases of less cooking. This has largely been predicated by my schedule. Tonight, for example, I didn't really make dinner. On Tuesdays I teach violin lessons from 4:00 to 7:00 in the evening, and by 7:00 I'm just hungry and don't want to cook. I make sure to eat a snack of some sort before the 4:00 lesson, but three hours is a long time for a snack to last (particularly when it's a leftover biscuit from Sunday's breakfast with butter and honey). Anyway, I did roast some cut up potatoes with olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, and parmesan cheese and had those along with some tortilla chips from Las Chavelas (they have the yummiest chips around). Tonight notwithstanding, I've been doing a lot more cooking this year, particularly in comparison with the preceding year. I've also been making a lot of things myself that for a long time I thought were overly difficult or impossible to make at home. One of those things is bread. I can't remember the last time I bought bread from the store. (Any time I'm tempted to, I read the ingredient list and am immediately put off.) Contrary to my prior belief, and what seems to be popular belief, making bread is not that hard. It's fairly uncomplicated and merely requires a certain amount of planning and a bit of time. If you can read, measure, set a timer, and follow fairly simple directions, you too can make bread.
Another of these items is cheese. Which brings me to today's topic. Homemade mozzarella cheese. I've thought about trying this once or twice a few months ago, but never actually did it. Since we now get a gallon of milk on a weekly basis from a local farm, it's necessary for us to deliberately use it up. (We also have a history of going through phases of milk usage. Sometimes we use quite a bit, other times not so much. This often coincides with cereal eating, which we don't do anymore. Breakfast cereals are highly processed, not to mention expensive, and I don't do highly processed anymore.) Lately, we haven't been drinking it quite as much as we had before, so I was left with a surplus at the end of several weeks. Once I've had to dump the leftover milk because it had soured (and I don't like sour milk). So, when I had nearly the entire gallon at the end of one week, I decided something must be done. I don't like tossing food, so I needed to find a way to use it. Enter the mozzarella cheese experiment.
Making mozzarella cheese sounds impressive, but it's really no more complicated than making dinner (possibly less complicated depending on the dinner). There are only three ingredients: milk, citric acid, and rennet. They must be combined in a particular order, and temperature is important. Basically, you dilute the citric acid and rennet in water, set aside the rennet for a bit, and mix the citric acid with the milk straight from the fridge. The milk must then be heated to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, which is done by placing the container of milk in a sink full of hot water. After the milk reaches 90 degrees, the rennet solution is added. At this point, it is left to sit for 5-10 minutes in order for curd to form. Once it has, you cut it up into 1 inch squares with a big knife, then scoop out the curd with a slotted spoon into a colander to drain the whey. At this point you can add 1/4 - 1/2 tsp of salt to the cheese, work it about a bit to incorporate the salt and help drain the whey. Then you fill a bowl with hot water (about 175 degrees...having a pot heating on the stove while doing the rest seems to achieve this quite well), cut the curd into 1-2 inch pieces again and drop them in the water. Using the spoon, mush the bits together, then start pulling it out of the water. The cheese will stretch, and should be able to be handled not too long after pulling it out of the water. Stretch and pull it like taffy until its smooth and shiny, form it into a ball, and put it in cold water to set the shape. Here is a link to the recipe. Afterward you have a big pot full of whey. This can be used to make ricotta cheese.
So, cheese, at least mozzarella cheese, is really not too difficult to make at home. And it's pretty tasty. Here is my little lump of cheese (after I've tasted it to make sure it turned out).
*The title is from the discussion at the beginning of Monty Python's Life of Brian. Cheesemakers is taken to be representative of all manufacturers of dairy products.
We made cheese and yogurt in microbiology lab in college and you're right, it's not too hard. Have fun!
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