I’m a failure!
At least at making homemade Mozzarella cheese.
My milk curdled just fine, it set up into a big giant curd just fine. Sliced it up like they tell you, spooned it out into a big cheesecloth lined colander.
I did a good job of straining the whey out. Maybe too good of a job.
But I could NOT get the cheese to get soft and pliable, nuking it didn’t help at all. I’d burn my hands on boiling bits of whey still trapped in the cheese, but the cheese would be just crumbling. Kept trying… recipe said to nuke it for 30 seconds or so, a few times…. That was plenty to get tiny pockets of whey super boiling, but not long enough to melt the curds so that they’d be pliable.
Finally I gave up and decided that we just have crumbles of mozzarella instead of nice smooth balls of it. The texture is still wonderful, as is the flavor… I got just the right amount of salt mixed in. It’s not as smooth as it could be but still chews just fine like fresh mozzarella should.
I will try again… perhaps with a better recipe. I wanted the short version, where you have Mozzarella cheese in about 1.5 hours. The other recipe I found took 6 hours to get the cheese. That’s more time than I want to spend on some fresh cheese, even if a lot of that is hanging it to drain whey. But if the short version doesn’t work for me… I’ll have to try the long version.
Dogs and cats all got whey mixed with kibble for dinner… and I still have a quart of whey. That’ll probably end up in the dogs food again, because if I try this again I will have another supply of it.
It’s all sort of shocking to me, because I’m good at stuff. LOL! What a blow to my ego here today… I can’t make fresh mozzarella! Oh, I’m sure there are lots of things I can’t do first time perfectly, but cheese is cooking and I can cook. Plus, cheese falls into the category of “crafts” and I’m good at that too. Oh well, live and learn as they say… and I know other failures will come to mind if I think on it.
Yes, popping up in my brain right now. Wanted to make a cake. Couldn’t find a recipe in the cookbook where we had all the right ingredients… except for a chocolate cake. Except I didn’t add the chocolate or cocoa, because I didn’t want a chocolate cake. It was bad. Probably a good base for a fruit buckle type cake, but without the chocolate in that cake it wasn’t very good.
I’ve burned stuff… I’m the only person I know who has burned boiled eggs. Boiled them dry and only realized it when they started exploding and sending egg and eggshells all over the kitchen. Being hearing impaired I just sort of heard a funny noise a couple times… why is it raining in the kitchen? :)
Anyhow, I will report back if I actually make some mozzarella that is like it’s supposed to be.
hugs,
Vyx
I’m guessing you’re using grocery store rennet. I don’t care what the package says, you can’t make cheese with it. Same thing happened to me.
I’ll mail you some of my good cheese rennet, you’ll be shocked at the difference. Look for it in the mail early next week.
Mailed you two cheese rennet tablets today, they’ll each make 4 batches of mozzarella. It’s really annoying that the grocery store rennet actually has instructions for making cheese, when it absolutely won’t work. I even bought a fresh box, figuring mine was too old. Then a friend gave me her good stuff.
Had I thought about it I’d have stuffed a few tablespoons of citric acid in a baggie and sent that too.
Actually, Val, I have rennet from the HomeBrew store. It’s a liquid rennet which is all they had outside of a kit.
The recipe I had said to use either lemon juice or vinegar instead of citric acid. I don’t have any citric acid, so I used vinegar. Perhaps I should have used lemon juice.
I do think the nuking wasn’t working well… a hot water bath might have worked better. Got tired of burning my palms so gave it up. :)
I’ll send you some citric acid. I’ll vacuum seal some and stick it in an envelope. (I have a pound! Ask me to tell you about that later.) Sent you the link for the “how to” via regular email earlier today.
My challenge has been finding whole cream to make mascarpone. I can’t find anything but ultrapasteurized at the store, and the only dairy around here closed a couple years ago.