Nourish Your Children

Kitchen Goal: Learn to make cheese

Project: 30-Minute Mozzarella Cheese

I made a goal for the year to learn to make cheese.  Our family eats a great deal of cheese.  We have been buying cheese from the Amish but the price keeps going up.  I spent January researching homemade cheese.  Mozzarella seemed like the easiest place to start. I have already been making cottage cheese every week for over a year with kefir.  Once the curds looked so firm I made Feta cheese.

Every recipe I looked at for Mozzarella cheese used a microwave.  We don’t have a microwave.  I thought I could put the cheese into the water to get it warm enough to stretch.  Well, it did not work.  I couldn’t get the cheese to stretch.

Does anyone have a Mozzarella cheese recipe that does not require a microwave?

I started with 1 cup of Real milk.  I put it in a stainless steel pan and brought the temperature to 50 degrees.  Added 2 tsp. of lemon juice.  When the temperature reached 88 degrees, I added 1/4 tsp of rennet dissolved in 1/4 cup of water.  I continued heating to 105 degrees then removed from heat and let sit until curds formed.  It was about 20 min.  The whey was milky white.  I put the curds into a metal strainer over a bowl and let drain while squeezing.  It formed a nice little roll.  I tried to “knead it like bread.”  This made a mess on the counter to I squeezed out more whey.  I never could “knead it like bread.”  So I put it into the whey which I heated up to about 120 degrees.  The cheese was more moldable but never a good knead or stretch.  I spent about an hour soaking and squeezing until I gave up.  The cheese never got shiny like all the recipes said. I put my ugly ball into the fridge in cold saltwater for about 10 min.  I brought it out, dried it off, and it grated nicely.  I put it on pizza and it melted fine.  The kids said the cheese itself tasted like nothing.  So I sprinkled some Parmesan on the pizza for taste.  Yum!

Sourdough pizza crust with homemade mozzarella cheese