"Say Cheese!" It's whey cool!

In the truly fabulous book, Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, she talked eloquently about their local organic food experience for one year. My favorite chapter, Zucchini Larceny, literally had me laughing so hard that I cried. Barbara also talked about making cheese and how easy it was to make fresh mozzarella.

So my friend Jenny and I decided we too should make cheese and for Christmas (she's probably one of the most thoughtful gift givers I know) she got me a cheese-making kit. 

So around New Years, for lack of time during my visit in mid-December, we took a try at making cheese, which of course, spurred clever puns like "say cheese!" and "whey cool!" Ha.

To start at the very beginning, it's a very good place to start (and yes, we sung that), we had to heat the milk and citric acid. We could hardly wait to reach the right temperature. Upon reaching that temp, we followed the directions, added the rennet and let it sit. At this point, I was certain we were going to have a failure. Closely observing the pot of milk for the appropriate length of time I was certain the milk looked exactly the same and we were going to be horribly disappointed.

To the doubter's surprise, we had formed a beautiful curd, which had to be cut into many small curds to allow more whey to start separating. In case you are curious, we absolutely recited: "Little Miss Muffet, sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider, who sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffet away."

 Eventually, after a few more stove steps, we had to scoop the curds into a microwave dish, we prepared for the next step of the process: microwave the curds until temperature is met to stretch the cheese.

And finally the cheese was ready to stretch. Whey Awesome! After a good stretching session, the cheese's cool down was in a cold water bath. 

It looked like cheese and melted like cheese, but in all honesty, it tasted a little bland and was sort of rubbery, despite following the directions very specifically. So we learned the hard way that you cannot add the salt until after you've gotten most of the whey out or you loose the salt to the whey. And for the rubbery part, this helped us to know how to time the ranges given in the recipe a bit better next time.

Our adventure was an overall success, as despite it's taste, we had made cheese and had a great time doing it.

Since then, I've made mozzarella again, knowing the above tips, and it turned out fantastically! It was so amazing. And then I tried my hand at ricotta, and it was spectacular.