“I don’t think it’s going to work,” I finally admitted to my friend Emily as I tried for the dozenth time to stir the mess of milk solids in the bowl together into cheese. It was supposed to be easy: several sources had assured me that nothing could be faster and simpler, or produce more delicious results, than making fresh mozzarella.
Finding the ingredients was in fact fairly easy. Rennet, which contains the enzyme that makes the milk coagulate (traditionally extracted from the stomachs of baby calves or goats but now usually made from vegetable matter), seemed the most daunting, but the second Whole Foods I tried carried it. Most important, apparently, is having good-quality milk that hasn’t been pasteurized at too high a temperature, preferably nonhomogenized. That came from Whole Foods too—Farmers’ All Natural Creamery brand, at four dollars for a half gallon. With a gallon of milk and the $5 dropper bottle of rennet, plus a bottle of water (because the recipe said any chlorine in our tap water would kill the enzymes in the rennet), I was already out $15 for stuff that was supposed to make less than a pound of cheese. So much for inexpensive—I usually buy ready-made fresh mozzarella for $7.50 a pound or less.
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The recipe said to keep stirring occasionally until the temperature reached 105 degrees, then turn off the heat and scoop the curds into a bowl. We ditched the candy thermometer and ended up just using the meat one, which showed the temperature climbing slowly to about 102 as I stirred, then shooting up to 108. We turned off the heat immediately and ladled the curds into a cheesecloth-lined strainer, squeezing out as much whey as we could. We put the curds in the microwave for a minute, poured off the whey again, and stirred them until they cooled.
So maybe the Internet wasn’t the best source for cheese-making instructions. This process was clearly a little more complex than we’d bargained for, and none of the recipes I’d found included any explanation of the why and how of cheese making. While we thought our thermometer issues had caused us to overheat the milk, and it seemed likely that adding too much citric acid had caused the sourness in our cheese—er, milk product—we really had no way of knowing for sure where we’d gone wrong. Maybe if I could talk to someone who knew what he was doing and watch the cheese being made . . .
Carmelo used to make the mozzarella from milk, he said, but making it from scratch became “too much work.”
Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t nearly as good at tying the cheese in knots as Carmelo was, but aside from being a little ugly my cheese turned out pretty well. It might have been slightly chewier than Carmelo’s—I could’ve spent too much time playing with it—but overall it was pretty similar in both taste and texture. The next day, though, when I took both out of the refrigerator, I noticed that my mozzarella was covered in slime while his was fine. I called the store and learned that he salts the hot water he pours over the curd, which I hadn’t done.
At this point I’d spent more than 20 minutes playing with the temperature, and the rennet was only supposed to be good for half an hour after I’d dissolved it in water. I was running out of time and the temperature refused to drop. I finally took the milk outside to cool down, and it obliged.
