Making Mozzarella

A few weeks ago we had a go at making some mozzarella cheese, following the procedure I learnt on my cheese making course.

The process is fairly simple, but it does require rennet and citric acid, so you can’t do it with just what you have in the kitchen at home like the lactic cheese.

What you do is heat the milk to 31C and add the citric acid and rennet. Then you gently heat (over a water bath) to 40.5C and leave the milk to separate.

Once separated, you scoop the curds out with a slotted spoon and allow them to drain in a sieve. That’s the standard bit. The bit that is different about mozzarella is that the curds are then briefly cooked in hot whey, which makes them stringy and stretchy. This gives the stringy cheese you use on pizzas.

What you do is heat the whey to 80C, then dip small blobs of curd into the whey for 30 seconds or so. The stretchy curds can then be shaped into mozzarella balls or pulled out into cheese strings. This is great fun for the kids!

The photos below show how we got on.