Homemade Mozzarella Cheese

Yes, I've been delinquent in posting new things. I've been busy with my recent marriage and all that comes with that, and it is hard to keep up with posting new articles.

HOWEVER....I learned something new, and it is really exciting. I learned how to make mozzarella cheese. There is a quick way, and a longer but better way. For now I will tell you about the quick way, since I have not ventured into the longer method.

There are a few things you will need that are usually not easily found in local stores.



One is rennet, this is what forms milk into curds. Another thing is Citric Acid. You can find this sometimes in the canning section of many stores; it is used also in canning tomatoes to keep their color and flavor.


The site that I buy my cheesemaking supplies is http://www.cheesemaking.com/ Ricki Carroll is an old hand at this, and has a good inventory of cheesemaking supplies. None of these ingredients are expensive.

Pour a gallon of whole milk into a large pot, from what I have read skim milk is NOT good for mozzarella. Add 1/2 teaspoon of Calcium Chloride (CaCl) into a quarter to a half cup of water, and mix THOROUGHLY. Then mix the water/CaCl solution into the pot. I was advised to use non-chlorinated water for mixing the ingredients, so I keep a gallon of bottled water handy just for cheese making. You can also let tap water sit for 24 hours to dechlorinate it. I don't really know at this point whether non-chlorinated water is that important or not. Since I am fairly new to this, I do what I am told.

Turn the heat to a low setting. My electric stove goes from 1 to 9 and I warm the milk at about 2 to 2.2. I could probably go higher but I'm a rookie and I'm scared!.



When the milk reaches 55 degrees F, add 1.5 teaspoons of Citric Acid, again mixing it into a quarter cup or so of water before adding to the milk. Stir it gently but well, and continue slowly heating.

It will start to look like Ricotta cheese.



When the milk reaches 88 degrees F, it's time to add 1/4 teaspoon of liquid rennet. Again, it is mixed with 1/4 cup water before adding.



Stir the milk with an up and down motion for one minute after adding the rennet. Continue heating the milk until it reaches 100 to 105 degrees. After adding the rennet you want to avoid bumping or moving the pot. Disturbing the pot can prevent a good curd from forming.



Turn off the heat but let it sit for about 20 minutes. The curd should start to separate from the side of the pot.



Using a large spoon (I found my pasta spoon worked wll) scoop out the curd from the pot and place into a large microwaveable bowl. I've heard the leftover whey (the liquid remaining) is great feed for chickens, hogs, etc, but I don't have any critters like that.

Press the curd down with your hand to remove excess liquid. Now place the bowl in your microwave oven on high for one minute. My microwave is fairly strong so you might want to add a little time to yours, depending on your microwave.



Since the cheese gets fairly hot, I put heavy duty kitchen gloves on at this point, and press the cheese with my hand to drain even more liquid from it. Wash your gloves before using, just like you do with your hands!



Drain off all of the excess whey that you can. Fold the cheese over and over in your hand to distribute the heat throughout the cheese.

Microwave 2 more times for 35 seconds each time. Each time you heat it knead the cheese again to distribute the heat. Knead it quickly until it is smooth and elastic like taffy.



When it feels like taffy, it is done! If the cheese breaks instead of stretching the cheese is too cold and needs reheated.

Mozzarella is best eaten fresh; roll it into small balls for fresh eating. However, it's not always practical to eat it right away. If you are making it for eating at a later time, you can form it into a loaf, a ball, or once I made 3 ropes out of the cheese and braided it (it looks really cool that way.) Then you want to place the cheese into a bowl of ice water for about a half hour to cool it rapidly. Now you can store it covered in the refrigerator.

Here's a idea I came up with, and it REALLY tastes good. When the finished cheese is still warm, shiny, smooth and like taffy, roll it out onto your counter with a rolling pin. Roll it into a rectangular shape about 12-16 inches long and 8-10 inches wide.



Now place just about anything you would like on it. In this batch I used fresh basil that I broke up into small pieces, and chopped black olives. A good prosciutto would be nice, I am going to try that sometime.





Now roll it up like a jelly roll



Place the cheese in plastic, wax paper or in a closed container until it cools and stiffens somewhat. Then slice across the roll to make small slices about a half inch thick, and eat.



Tonight I went to a dinner party where I made bruschetta and it turned out GREAT! I used this recipe for the bread. I cut the bread into about 1/2 inch slices. Then I made a batch of mozzarella and formed it into a loaf/roll about 2 inches in diameter.

When the cheese cooled I cut slices that were about 1/4 inch thick. I baked the plain bread for just a few minutes in a 350 degree oven (not broiler) to make it more crisp, then placed 2 slices of the mozzarella on each slice of the bread. I topped all that with a mixture of finely chopped tomatoes, smashed and chopped garlic, chopped fresh basil, grated Parmesan cheese and a quick splash of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I then baked it for a couple more minutes until the cheese was starting to melt and the edges of the bread just started to brown a little bit. Be sure to watch the bruschetta in the oven closely while it is baking. It doesn't take long and it would be easy to set off smoke detectors instead of eating a good bruschetta.

It was SO good, it disappeared quickly! I will have to make another batch for us to eat at home.

Mmmm....lotsa mozza!

Spring 2010 Garden Update

As you can see above, I cut my first salad this past Wednesday, May 5th. I use May 1st as a target date; last year it was about April 28th, the year before it was about May 5th. As I have stated before, I like to harvest my first salad at about the same time most people are thinking of breaking ground and buying seed. I'm fairly competitive, even with my gardening. I think they should come out with a full-contact gardening Olympic event.

Here I am cutting my first spinach, lettuce and pulling a green onion for salad



The two rows of green in the pic are two different plantings of spinach. I grew a lot of it and hope to blanch/freeze some of it.

You can't see it in the pic but in the back row is garlic, in between the two green rows are a couple rows of onions. I'm going to plant more onions from sets because I end up eating so many pulled early for green onions for salads.

My taters are popping through the ground too. Yukon Gold was the variety I planted this year. I've had pretty good success with that variety, and can't wait for my first 'new taters.'

Every year I try something new, and this year it is kale and collards. They popped through the surface just in the past couple of days. I just discovered collard greens this year, and really like them. I cook them with a piece of bacon added to the pot, then add vinegar to them when I am ready to eat them. That's how I learned to like spinach when I was a kid, the vinegar really made it good.

I also have Bibb and a Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce that are ready to be cut. You have to plant lettuce and spinach early, they don't do well after things heat up outside. I usually plant these early veggies about mid-March here in central Ohio.

Sugar Snap peas are an edible-pod pea variety and I planted two 10-foot rows of those, each row on other sides of a trellis. I trellis them with a couple of 2x2 posts with wire strung between the posts. What I don't eat fresh I blanch and freeze, then vacuum pack.

I have grown herbs for a number of years now, but increased my planting this year. Usually they are limited to my small herb gardens, but planted a couple of 10 foot rows of basil, and a row each of cilantro and parsley right in my veggie garden. I think I might be able to sell some of them at a local farm market(?) Even if I can't sell them, fresh herbs are a great gift and I will give a lot away to friends and neighbors.

Purple basil is something I discovered last year. It can be used as any other basil, but I infused vinegar with it and it looks beautiful. The vinegar turns a beautiful purple/pinkish color and has the basil taste also. So I am growing it again, but this year I am growing a row that is about 6 feet long.

Most of my perennial herbs are doing well again this year; sage, oregano, lemon thyme and lime thyme, chives (and some garlic chives.) I planted tarragon last year, for making tarragon vinegar, and didn't realize until this spring that it is a perennial also. It came up with a fury and my tarragon plants are already a couple of feet tall!

Tarragon:



I planted a LOT of sweet basil this year. I like to use it fresh in cooking, but a good way to use it is to make pesto. I make large batches of it then put it in ice cube trays and freeze it. Then I put the cubes in freezer bags. I can already taste it spread on a piece of homemade Italian bread, or a dollop of it in a pasta dish.

Here is one of my two little herb gardens as it looked the other day. I will plant a few more things in the spaces that are open. The 2 potted plants are my babies, my bay trees. You can't beat fresh bay leaves for cooking and you won't go back to store-bought, dried out bay leaves once you have tried the fresh ones.



The fall is when you are supposed to plant garlic, and I usually do plant it then. However, it just didn't work out this past fall, and I planted the garlic early this spring. If you plant in spring, the bulbs are much smaller compared to autumn-planted garlic. I had some HUGE garlic bulbs the past couple of years, and I am kicking myself for not planting it last fall. Oh well, there's always next year...

Just for kicks and giggles, I planted a line of Mammoth Sunflowers in the back row of the garden. That should look pretty nice, and they produce quite a few seeds for eating, roasting, etc

The temperature is supposed to go down to an overnight low in the high 30's this weekend, so I am going to wait to plant the maters and peppers. I can, however, plant broccoli and cabbage any time now, they tolerate cool temperatures very well.

My grapes (Concord and Catawba) are growing well too, and showing small flowers/bunches already. I need to spray them with Mancozeb soon, this will help prevent what I think is called black rot. The grapes will form normally, then almost overnight a black spot appears on the end of the grape and the whole grape dies, and dies quickly. One day you notice a spot on the grapes and in a couple of days your grapes are gone. It broke my heart when that happened a couple years in a row until I discovered Mancozeb.

I think I am losing my favorite tree, my sour cherry. Last year the leaves formed then a large number of the leaves just wilted, and I didn't get any cherries from the tree. This year it appears that the same thing is happening. I need to get a picture to the extension office or some other experts for their opinion of what is happening.

So the garden is progressing. I'm eating out of the garden already, but still have things to plant as soon as I can, and when the weather permits. Things are getting pretty exciting for this gardener!

Infused oils and vinegars

Necessity was the mother of invention for this project. Not that I invented this but it was somewhat new to me.

I grew quite a bit of purple basil for the first time this year and needed to find a use for it. The thought of purple pesto was somewhat strange so I started surfing the internet for ideas. I saw a picture of some beautiful purple-basil-infused vinegar and I had to try it.

I mixed cider vinegar and white vinegar at a 50/50 rate, which has a beautiful color even before infusing. In a half gallon of the mixed vinegar I added about 2 cups of purple basil leaves.


I let this set on the counter for a week, then filtered out the basil leaves and anything else that might have come off of the leaves.


Muslin was a good choice for a filtering material. I also use it in cheese making instead of traditional 'cheesecloth', which is almost worthless when actually trying to use it for cheese making. I could have left the leaves in the vinegar but I know from experience that the leaves start to fade and wilt quite a bit and do not look very good.

I also infused another batch with garlic. I smashed about 6 cloves with the flat side of a knife and let those sit in the vinegar with the basil for a week. It smells wonderful after a week, with the basil and garlic smell. It will probably be very good in many Italian dishes.

Nasturtiums are an edible flower that I grow, I haven't used them in any dishes yet but need to do it. I have read some nice ideas for cooking with them. A simple salad topped with a few nasturtium flowers would be a very nice presentation. I tried to keep some of the fresh flowers in a bottle of vinegar but the acidity of the vinegar wilts and fades them too much. However, in that failed attempt I found that the flowers color the vinegar with a beautiful color:

The bottle on the right is 50/50 cider/white vinegar right after adding the nasturtiums. The one on the left is a few days after adding the nasturtiums. Also in both of the bottles are stalks of garlic chives.

I also have started a couple batches of basil and garlic infused extra-virgin olive oil.


These leaves are green basil and not the purple basil (the purple might make an interesting looking oil though!) From what I have read I will have to let this sit for a month or longer to properly infuse the oil. Before adding the basil leaves it helps to smash the leaves quite a bit to help release the flavor of the basil. I also added about 4-5 smashed garlic cloves to this. I plan on filtering all of this out when it is completed. If I am going to use this to actually cook with, I am going to research whether this will require heating after the infusion is complete. I think that even if I don't find any information about it, I might heat it to a little over 212 degrees (boiling point of water, and a low heat for oil) for about 10 minutes, just to kill any of the 'nasties' that might be in there. I can't see that it will hurt it, and can only help.

Another herb that I grew again this year was tarragon. Simply cut the tarragon to the right length and slip into the jars of vinegar. It's very simple and look great.


The hardest part of this project is finding nice looking bottles to use. The ones pictured here with the spouts I found at Walmart for about $4 each. I have seen some very nice ones on sites online, but they can be pricey. If I decide to get any of those, I would probably make them into Christmas presents.

There are a lot of other ideas that you can find online, search with the term 'infused vinegar recipes' or 'infused garlic recipes' or something similar. Or simply use your imagination and think of what would look good or taste good with vinegar and/or oil.

New Babies

The early crops are already popping up, and they were planted less than 2 weeks ago. I read on the back of the seeds packages and for the early crops it says "Plant in early spring as soon as ground can be worked'. I figure that if I can scratch a line in the muddy and/or frozen ground to place a line of seeds, then that is the ground being worked. And every year I hear at least a few people saying that 'it's too early, you can't grow anything yet'. Those are the people that I like to take a bowl of salad to in the first week of May. That's about the time they are thinking about what seeds they should buy.

On March 14th I planted my first early crops and by March 24th I had 3 types of lettuce, spinach, peas and radishes visibly growing above the ground. Also, I have my rhubarb and the garlic that I planted last fall coming up. If the weather doesn't take a turn for the worse, then I might be eating salad by the end of April, and just might set a personal record for the earliest salad. My personal best so far was last year, I had my first salad on May 5th.


Here's some new-baby pics:

Asparagus

From 2009 Garden

Sugar Snap peas

From 2009 Garden

One of my 3 varieties of lettuce

From 2009 Garden

Spinach (my favorite!)

From 2009 Garden

Rhubarb

From 2009 Garden

Garlic

From 2009 Garden

Yes, it's early, but many veggies THRIVE when it's early and either are stunted or bolt when it gets hot.

Garlic Jelly ??

Every year when I do my canning I like to attempt to make something different, something I have never made before. This year I decided to use some of the incredible amount of garlic that I grew, and make garlic jelly. Yes, it sounds very strange, but it is really good when served with cream cheese and crackers. This is also the way I serve my Hot Pepper Jam, and it is really tasty this way. I'm thinking that it would go well with a plate of bread, cheeses and olives also.

Garlic Jelly Recipe

Ingredients

1/2 cup fresh garlic, finely chopped
2 cups white wine vinegar
5 1/2 cups sugar
3 cups water 1 (2 ounce) package dry pectin
1/4 teaspoon butter or oil
2 drops food coloring (optional)

Directions

Combine garlic& vinegar in a 2 qt. kettle. Simmer mixture gently, uncovered, over medium heat for 15 minutes.
Remove pan from heat& pour mixture into a 1 quart glass jar. Cover& let stand at room temperature for 24-36 hours.
Pour flavored vinegar through a wire strainer into a bowl, pressing the garlic with the back of a spoon to squeeze out liquid. Discard any residue.
Measure the liquid and add vinegar, if needed, to make 1 cup. Measure sugar into a dry bowl. Combine the garlic-vinegar solution& the water in a 5 or 6 quart kettle. Add pectin, stirring well. Over high heat, bring mixture to boil, stirring constantly to avoid scorching. Add sugar,& stir well.
Bring mixture to a full, rolling boil. Add butter to reduce foaming. Continue stirring.
Boil the mixture hard for exactly 2 minutes.
Remove pan from heat& skim off any foam.
Add red, yellow or orange food coloring if desired. Pour jelly into prepared glasses.
Place in boiling water bath canner for 10 minutes.