Making Fresh Mozzarella

I feel like I should make mozzarella a few more times before writing this post, because we're still so new at it! But I'm trying to get this Cheese Unit all written up before I forget everything, so I'm just going to plow ahead and show you what we did, failures and all.

So, we wanted to make some cheeses for this unit, of course, but I wanted to keep it pretty simple for our first attempts---nothing that needed aging, for example. (Maybe we'll try that someday!) We have made paneer before, but this time we made yogurt (technically a cheese), which is super easy, and ricotta, which is super easy, and then we moved on to mozzarella. Mozzarella is different because it's coagulated by rennet, so you can't just make it with lemon juice and milk like you can ricotta. A friend recommended this site, so I read a bunch of stuff there, and on other cheesemaking sites online, and finally settled on ordering this mozzarella kit. It has cheesecloth, a thermometer, rennet, citric acid, and cheese salt in it, and you can make a ton of cheese with it.

Here are the basic instructions: you heat a gallon of milk (to kill any bacteria, I assume) and then add part of a dissolved rennet tablet (or liquid rennet). You also add citric acid. Then you let it sit 5 minutes. It becomes stiff like pudding. You cut it into curds, then drain the whey and keep heating the curds to release more and more whey until you can stretch it. At the end you knead in some salt. And that's the whole process in a nutshell.

The first time we tried the mozzarella, we didn't get very good curds. They were small and ricotta-y, like this:

The instructions we had said that this might mean our milk was ultra-pasteurized (but it wasn't)---and it wouldn't work, so we should just start over.

We drained out the whey, stirred the curds together, and added salt, and used this as a cheese spread on crackers. It was quite tasty! But it was not really mozzarella.

Hmm. The instructions said that some milk is almost ultrapasteurized, and the high temperatures make it unsuitable for making cheese. Our milk was just regular milk from the BYU Creamery and it seemed like it should be okay, but we decided to try again with some goat milk we got from a goat dairy nearby.

We love visiting the goats. They are so cute and friendly! (At least they are friendly through the fence!) :)

Armed with goat milk, we tried again. This time the curds looked very promising. They were bigger and held together a little better than before:

But when the time came for stretching the cheese, again we couldn't get it to be stretchy. It was just in a soft lump in the bowl and when you tried to stretch it, it just broke apart softly, kind of like one of those soft cheese balls you serve with crackers. (Sorry I don't have a picture of that stage.)

Again, though, it tasted good, and this time I kind of patted some of the cheese onto pizza for our dinner.

You can see how it doesn't really hold together, and it's certainly not sliceable like regular fresh mozzarella. However, it melted beautifully, and it tasted really good on the pizza.

At this point, honestly, having already used two gallons of milk, I might have just given up on this. It was tasty, but it didn't seem worth all the work. But, then our friend Tami from Harmon's saved the day! She told us that they do mozzarella demonstrations on Saturdays at the store. But since we were going to be busy that Saturday, she said we could arrange to meet her at another time and she would show us how to stretch the mozzarella.

When we got there, Tami had hurt her wrist and couldn't handle the cheese! But she gave us a big container of curds, some instructions, and said we should go home and try it ourselves. Her instructions were a little different than our other ones. She said we should heat the cheese to 180 degrees instead of 135 before stretching it! So, we took the curds home, heated them, and . . .

Finally! They stretched. It was beautiful.

The fresh mozzarella is so delicious! It tastes amazing while it's still warm. We formed it into balls so we could slice it to eat with tomatoes and basil later. This ball is spreading out because it's still warm. I should have put it in cold water before it had time to settle like this.

Now, having had one success, I was motivated enough to try the whole thing one more time, from scratch. This time, like the first time, we used our regular grocery-store milk. We used 1/2 of a rennet tablet instead of 1/4.

After adding the rennet, the curds looked very nice.

We ladled them into a colander so the whey could drain, then put them into a plastic bowl.

Then we heated the bowl in the microwave. This time we kept heating it until it was 180 degrees, like we had with the Harmon's cheese. But still, the cheese was soft and lumpy and unconsolidated, just like it had been the first time. We were afraid we were going to be stuck with just a cheese "spread" again! But I had talked to a neighbor who had made cheese before, and her advice was: "It doesn't matter what the curds are like. Just keep heating them. When they are hot enough, keep stretching and it will work."

So, we persevered, heating them 30 seconds or a minute at a time in the microwave, stirring them with my hands, and then heating again. The curds got so hot that I had to put on cloth gloves (the stretchy kind you wear in the winter) beneath my rubber gloves so my hands wouldn't get burned! I just kept scooping the curds over each other in the bowl with my hands, trying to get them to form a ball. Suddenly they got shiny and I could tell they were starting to melt together! Then I could stretch them:

(cloth gloves underneath rubber gloves) You can see the kind of gritty-looking cheese on the wrists and arms of the yellow gloves? That is the cheese that stuck to me before it was hot enough. Once the curds were hot enough, they stuck together and cleaned off my gloves as I stretched the cheese.

And then we could form the cheese into nice little balls:

So! It was another success, and this mozzarella was just as delicious as the other. Hooray!

I think, now that I have seen this work, that if I had persisted longer with the first batch, I could have made that one work also. I just never got the curds hot enough and I wasn't patient enough with the kneading/stretching process. 

In short, here are my recommendations if you want to make this cheese. I really like the kit we got, and it will make you bunches of cheese. But, don't stop when the cheese is heated to 135---just keep heating and kneading, heating and kneading, until the cheese finally starts to be stretchable. Don't give up on it! And wear double gloves so you won't get burned. Since we have more rennet, next time I will double-glove Abe and Seb and let them do the stretching, but it's definitely too hot for really small kids to work with. However, little ones would probably love to watch and definitely have tastes of the warm cheese! It is SO delicious. 

Heber Valley Artisan Cheese Field Trip

Heber Valley Artisan Cheese is an awesome place to tour, not so much because of what you get to see (although that was pretty cool; but it's only a couple rooms) but because the owner is a fascinating person to listen to. He was on the National Dairy Board for years and years, and is a third-generation dairy farmer, so he has tons of knowledge about the subject. He went to college and got his degree in Mechanical Engineering and then decided to come back to the family farm because he wanted that life for his family. His family started making cheese just a few years ago as a way to adapt and stay profitable at a time when a lot of small dairy farms are going out of business.

One of the coolest things he told us about on our tour was just how experimental and creative the cheesemaking process can be. He and his family will try all kinds of flavors in their cheese (either mixed in, or rubbed on the outside) and then just see what happens over time. Some of their more interesting flavors have been a chili verde cheese (really yummy), an Oreo cheese that we didn't get to taste, but he says some people love it, and a dark chocolate-rubbed cheese which we tried and which was awesome. It's cheese-flavored, and then suddenly after you taste the sourness of the cheese, you get hit with the chocolate taste right in the back of your throat. Fascinating. The chocolate one was hard to get right, he said, because the bacteria in the cheese eat the sugars in the chocolate and leave mostly the bitter taste behind, so you have to get the right combination of flavors with that intense chocolate taste.

Another really interesting thing was that he said the flavors of the cheese are really variable and evolve-able(?)---they go through a lot of change over time. So you have to keep tasting the cheeses to see what happens to the flavor. Sometimes a cheese will be really good at six months but at twelve months it isn't good anymore, but then maybe at 18 months it's good again. For example, he said his son had wanted to try an alfredo-sauce flavor in one of the cheeses, and at six months they tasted it and everyone agreed that it was totally disgusting. But they left it to age for another six months just to see what would happen, and at a year, they tasted it again and couldn't even believe it was the same cheese because it was so good.

They have cheese tastings at their store once a month where you can go and taste something like forty of their experimental flavors of cheese, and rate the ones you like, etc. It sounds really fun and we want to go sometime (I think it costs $5).

Another fun part of this tour was tasting the fresh cheese curds right out of the tank---he went over and dipped some out for us and let us taste them right then and there. They were totally amazing. Yum!

Showing us some of the curds undergoing "cheddaring" (which is a process where you press, stack,  and flip the curds repeatedly to create a drier cheese).

Fresh curds

Whey draining from the curd tank

Machine that presses the curds once they're in the hoops. The boys really liked this machine.

Cheese cave (it was chilly in there)

This was a great field trip and we learned a lot! We also bought some raw milk (we've never tried raw milk before!) and it was delicious. We will definitely drop by here again next time we're up in Heber or Midway!

Harmon's Field Trip (Types of Cheese)

(Sorry I got you with your eyes closed, Tami)

There are a billion "Cheese for Dummies"-type books out there, teaching you how to taste cheese and pair it with wine and whatnot. We weren't really interested in becoming wine and cheese connoisseurs, but I did want to branch out a bit and learn about some cheeses we hadn't tried before, so I called Harmon's and asked if we could come in and talk to their cheesemonger. We arranged a time. But, when we got there, the lady I had talked to on the phone . . . wasn't there! And hadn't passed on the message to the other cheesemonger! Argh! It could have been really disappointing (like our other Harmon's field trips), but Tami, the cheesemonger (oh how I love that word) who WAS there, saved the day!!! Yes, the multiple exclamation points are necessary, because she was that awesome. Although unprepared for our visit, she spent the next hour with us, explaining where each cheese came from, how it was made, what made it different from other cheeses, what it would taste good with, etc. The children and I were all enthralled. Tami knows everything about cheese! And she was SO interesting to listen to. She kept telling us all these random facts (like, one of the big wheels of Parmesan-Reggiano costs $1500! And it only comes from one place in the world, where it's kept in this huge cave as big as a warehouse) that made us feel like we were True Cheese Insiders. We loved it!

The cheeses at the cheese counter are arranged in a certain order (basically, soft to firm to hard, with blue cheeses on one end) and Tami showed us how to figure out what cheese you might want to try based on what you are going to use it for. And then she picked out a huge selection for us to sample!

We tried:

• Blue Stilton
• Farmer's Cheese
• White Stilton with blueberries
• Sage Derby
• Smoked Gouda
• Smoked White Cheddar Curds
• Poet's and Writers ("Oscar Wilde") Cheese
• Merlot Bellavitano
• Basque
• Gruyere
• Parmesan Crisps

Some of them were way outside what we had tried before (I never would have picked out the White Stilton with Blueberries, for example!) but we LOVED them. Each was interesting and delicious in its own way. It was cool to learn about the different ways of slicing and presenting each type of cheese, too. She had a great selection of knives and tools to show us!

Later that week we had a cheese-tasting dinner where we tried various cheeses we acquired on our several field trips. Delicious!

Anyway, we now love Tami so much. We think she is the best cheesemonger ever! We made her some lemon curd and went back to visit another day, and she gave us some curds to make our own fresh mozzarella, but that will be in another post.

Quick Homemade Ricotta (in 30 minutes!)

My friend Andrea made ricotta and we'd been wanting for a long time to try it ourselves! And it is so easy and delicious, just like she said.

TRUE ricotta cheese, we learned, is made from whey ("ricotta" means "recooked"), but it only works with whey from a rennet-coagulated cheese. [Update: I'm wrong. It only works with whey from a CULTURE-coagulated cheese. So you can't use the whey from the mozzarella cheese to make ricotta, either, unfortunately.] In other words, you can't make this ricotta (which is vinegar-coagulated) and then make MORE ricotta from its whey. More's the pity. So this is not a true ricotta, because it begins with whole milk instead of with whey.

We tried out Andrea's recipe, and a few others, and one thing we eventually modified from hers is that the two-hour cooling time after you add the vinegar seemed unnecessary (many other recipes omitted that step). Which means you can be eating the ricotta that much sooner; yay!

Here is what we did:

In a large pot, combine a gallon of whole milk (lower-fat milks work too, from what I have read) and a pint of cream.

Heat until the milk is not-quite-boiling, between 165 and 185 degrees. Heating it all the way to 185, we read, is not really necessary if the milk has already been pasteurized, so the lower temperature works fine.

Stir in 1 1/2 teaspoons salt.

Stir in 1/4 cup plus 2 Tablespoons of white vinegar. (You can use lemon juice instead, especially if you're going to use the ricotta in a sweet recipe like cheesecake.) Watch the milk coagulate as you stir! The curds are white blobs and the whey is a clearish liquid. This is really cool to watch.

Let it sit for a few minutes and continue to coagulate.

Line a strainer with cheesecloth or a few paper towels. If you want to save your whey (it's great for adding protein to bread, smoothies, etc.), put the strainer on top of a bowl or bucket to catch the whey. If not, put the strainer in the sink. Using a slotted spoon, spoon the curds into the strainer. When you have most of the curds removed, pour the rest of the mixture into the strainer to get the last curds. The whey will slowly drain out either into the sink or into your lower bowl. 

At this point you can let the curds sit for as long as you want to get the desired consistency. If you're going to eat the ricotta immediately, you only need to let them drain for 5-10 minutes! (That means you can make this ricotta, start to finish, in about a half hour!) If you want a drier ricotta for cooking lasagne, etc. with, let the curds drain for a half hour or longer.

We ate our ricotta immediately, drizzled with honey, and it was amazing! 

Bacteria and Enzymes in Cheese

image from here

Of course any unit on cheese has to include discussion of bacteria and enzymes. Here are some resources we used:

A video about Louis Pasteur and the development of Pasteurization. (This one is weird, but my kids liked it.)

Another video on the history of pasteurization.

How does pasteurization kill bacteria?

Cool photos of bacteria in the mouth

List of common dairy bacteria

Cool video showing how many bacteria are found on our hands. Plus you get to hear the narrator (Australian?) call geysers "geezers."

Cute video introduction to enzymes.

How enzymes work.

Also to go along with our study of beneficial bacteria, we made yogurt. We do this regularly, but it was fun to actually talk about what is happening on a microscopic level. We like to make our own yogurt in the crock pot. My friend Andrea told me about this method, and it's worked really well for us.

Beehive Cheese Company Field Trip

Beehive Cheese Company doesn't really do tours ("anymore," said the guy I talked to, which made me wonder what changed and why?), but they were willing to let us come and sample some cheese and watch their video about cheesemaking, and talk to us about their process, so we made the drive up to Uintah. Nice Andy even let us see the cheese cave, so we were happy.

After our "tour"/talk, we drove out west to see the dairy cows that supply Beehive Cheese Company with their milk. It was really idyllic. I love farmland.

We had a picnic at a little park we found, and enjoyed the lovely end-of-summer weather. It was beautiful!

Rockhill Creamery Field Trip

Rockhill Creamery, north of Logan, is a true micro-creamery---they have six cows and a darling little farm with flowers growing along the driveway. The owners were so nice! We visited on Saturday, so there was a little farmer's market going on when we arrived. After all the sellers packed up their produce, Pete, the creamery owner, showed us around.

First we saw the cheese cave, where there's a short video that explains the process of cheesemaking. You can look through the window and see all the beautiful cheese wheels ripening.

The milking room---so clean! The milk goes right from the cow into tubes that take it to a refrigerated tank.

Whey tank

Part of the barn

Then we got to meet the cows, which was awesome. They were so pretty and they had the nicest brown eyes! They were friendly, too.

Elsa really loved Junie, and wanted to sniff her and lick her. Junie was verrrrry nervous about it, and since then she can't stop talking about it. Every time we drive anywhere, she says, "Look, Mommy! Cows! That cow won't sniff me." "Look Mommy, Horsies! That horse won't sniff me. He won't lick me. No."

Such a beautiful pasture for them to graze in. I love Cache Valley!

You can see the creamery building here, where they sell the cheese, and the big milk tank on its right. And the happy cow-dog running toward us! :)

We love the Rockhill Creamery! We bought some delicious cow's milk feta, but my favorite (we tasted several) was the Edam, which they were all out of that day. But this was a wonderful field trip! We're so glad we got to visit! Thanks, Pete and Jennifer!

Cheese Unit schedule and Lesson Plan

Cheese! We loved this unit. There are several Utah-based cheesemakers and dairies, so we had a lot of field trips. And you'll be pleased to know that we incorporated those essential Cheese resources, the first Wallace and Gromit movie ("A Grand Day Out") and Monte Python's "Cheese Shop" sketch, into our studies as well.

Some resources:

Two videos about how cheese is made: here and here.

This video also shows the cheesemaking process (no words).

How Swiss Cheese is made.

How Blue Stilton cheese is made.

How String Cheese is made.

A robot flips cheese wheels over. Fun.

Pinterest page for this unit.