32 New Things: Make Cheese

I was in Italy once (oh yes, I am the kind of person who will casually drop that into a conversation, yes I am) and the best thing was the cheese. Oh, the delicious, fresh mozzarella cheese. I ate all the cheese, and it was so good. I can't even tell you. Store-bought mozzarella does not compare. Not even the kind floating in that weird tub of water. When I found out you could make your own mozzarella, at home, in like 30 minutes, obviously I had to try it.

Cut to like 3 years later and it finally happened. My cousin came down for fat girl weekend cooking camp and we, through the miracle of science, created cheese. It was really quite easy. The method we used took maybe 4 ingredients- milk, citric acid, rennet, and salt. Heat it up, stir it around, knead it, and boom- cheese. It's basically magic.

We made 2 batches of cheese. For the first batch we used organic milk which had been pasteurized but not ultra-pasteurized. Science moment- the high temperatures of ultra-pasteurization damage the calcium and it won't make curds. Or something. Organic milk is not necessary but it came from Whole Foods and that's just what they had. It was around $5 for a gallon- not bad for what came out to about a pound of cheese.

For the 2nd batch of cheese we used raw milk. Raw milk is illegal in a lot of places, but not in Arizona. We found it at a weird little health food store and it was $13 for a gallon. They keep it in the back and you have to ask for it using a secret code. I'm just kidding, we got it from the dairy case, but that would have been funny. It may be injurious to your health but we live on the edge when there is cheese involved.

So to make cheese you heat up the milk and the other stuff to make curds. 

 This is the pasteurized milk curd. It did not look like the picture on the recipe we were using, but we carried on anyway.

This is the raw milk curd. It looked exactly like the internet said it should. We were very pleased and excited. Oh, this is also the point where you'd make jokes about cutting the cheese, if you were a 12 year old boy.

Once you have curds, you drain them and form them into a ball.

You microwave them and pull them (like taffy, although we misunderstood and kneaded them, like bread. This lead to kind of rubbery cheese. Live and learn.) I'm pretty sure this is exactly how the Amish make cheese. Microwave the curds.

Then an ice water bath:

And then you have cheese. Just like that. So easy!

So delicious...okay, here is truth time. I did not find the cheese to be very delicious. The regular milk cheese did not have any flavor. The raw milk cheese tasted like...well, probably like raw milk. It did not taste like delicious fresh Italian mozzarella, which as I understand is made from water buffalo milk. Unfortunately I could not find a local source for water buffalo milk. This may be a possible business endeavor for the future.

That being said, we do not give up on fresh cheese. Oh no, we do not. We made some delicious fresh bread:

We topped that bread with cheese and basil and tomato and balsamic for delicious fresh bruschetta:

And we put that fresh mozzarella on homemade pizza, which was obviously so good we almost didn't get a picture.

Yum.

The moral of the story is: make the cheese. You will not be sorry. It's so fast, so easy, and there is something highly satisfying about seeing milk turn into cheese. Magic!