Makin' The Mozz!!!!...part one

While I have made ricotta cheese at home, I have never attempted mozzarella in my kitchen until now. Benjamin came over to share in this cooking adventure and in preparation I looked up several different recipes on the Internet and in magazine articles. Every one was similar in certain ways but very different also. They all said that this is a difficult cheese to make but I figured that since my ricotta was so good this would be easy. I mean, how difficult can it be to make something in the kitchen????? I found one recipe that said that it was important to sterilize the entire kitchen before making this cheese. Yeah.....like that's going to happen! I also found a recipe that said you could make mozzarella in 30 minutes so that was the one I printed out. BIG MISTAKE!!!!! These things take time and you can't rush a curd.
As Benjamin and I found out, all the warnings about the difficulty of making this type of cheese were right on. You need milk of course, rennet and citric acid. I gathered all of my cheese making utensils and bought fresh milk. We followed all the instructions and heated everything very slowly. We carefully checked the temperature and made sure that everything was correct. We jumped for joy when we saw that curds were beginning to form....... and then........NOTHING!
A gallon of milk produced this tiny amount of curd. In all the instructional pictures I saw, the curds were big and think and had been sliced into little cubes in the pot. Our curds were anemic and not stiff enough to be sliced. Pretty pathetic, huh? They turned to mush when we tried to put them in very hot water to make them into mozzarella cheese. I don't know where we went wrong. I am not sure if we ever achieved a "clean break"as they say. I never saw real whey (the grayish liquid).We felt we had to salvage this in some way so we "recooked" the milk to make ricotta cheese.
I added some buttermilk to the pot, and immediately the curds separated from the whey.
The recooked leftover milk produced this beautiful ricotta. At least all was not lost. By the way, ricotta means "recooked" and comes from the whey that is left over when you make some other kind of cheese.

We are going to try again but this time we will buy curds that are already made. This is Benjamin looking for places that sell curds. He found Todaro Bros. They will sell curds by the pound. When I took the Mozzarella Course at Artisanal Cheese Institute, we started with the curds and went from there. At first I thought it was like cheating, but now I see the wisdom! Stay tuned for Makin' The Mozz, Part Deux.
Bon Appetit!
Clare.