Mozzarella Cheese

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I’m Rebekah Nolen, cheesemaker, and teacher at Ploughshare. I’ve been making cheese now for about 12 years. I first started making cheese at my house in just small, four gallon batches on my stove for my family, and about five years ago, I started working at Brazos Valley Cheese and I’ve been teaching the cheese classes at Ploughshare for about 7 years now.

In this video today, we’ll be making a two gallon batch of mozzarella. You can use any source of milk. You want to try and get milk from a local dairy or use some sort of name brand milk like Horizon, Promised Land, something like that. Mozzarella is one of the most fun, quickest, easiest cheeses to make, and it’s nice because you can start it even in the afternoon and you have cheese ready for that evening.

And once you’ve made it a few times and you’ve mastered the hang of stretching it and everything, you can get a little more adventurous. You can make braids and marinate them, make little balls to put on top of salad, string cheese, stretch it right over a pizza, any of those things. It’s a very good, multi-purpose cheese. It’s not very hard to make.

OK, today we’ll be making a two gallon batch of mozzarella. The first thing you want to start with is two gallons of milk. You can pour those into your pot. The first thing you want to do is add three teaspoons of citric acid dissolved in one cup of cool water. Once you’ve added your citric acid, you can go ahead and turn your heat on to high.

And what we’re going to do right now is we’ll be heating up the milk to between 88 and 90 degrees. Usually if you’re getting your milk from your refrigerator, it starts out between 45 and 50. You want to keep staring it while you’re doing it, just to keep the citric acid dissolved throughout the whole thing. When you’re making this mozzarella, which is the 30 minute mozzarella, the citric acid is what will help your cheese to stretch, so you want to make sure that it’s dissolved throughout.

Now, mozzarella can be made with cow’s milk or goat’s milk. The result is pretty much the same. When you make it with goat’s milk, it will make a little bit of a smoother mozzarella, but cow’s milk is what most mozzarella is made from. OK, so now while this is heating up until it’s 88 to 90, you want to go ahead and start the hot water that you’ll use for stretching your mozzarella.

So you’ll start with, in this pot, I have three quarts of water, and I want to bring it to 160, so I’ll start with it on high. Now what I’ll do is I’ll add half a cup of salt to this, and that’s what’s going to put the salt in the cheese. You want to stir this to make sure that all your salt gets dissolved. You want this to be between 160 and 170. If it gets much hotter than 170, it will melt your cheese once you pour it over.

OK, so while your milk is still heating, you want to go ahead and dissolve your rennet. You want to dissolve it in a quarter cup of cool water. This is vegetable rennet, and these tablets come in perforations. They’re perforated into quarters. For a two gallon batch, you’re going to use a quarter of a tablet. Just divide this into quarters.

And I’ll let this just sit here until I’m ready to add it in. It dissolves pretty quick, so it’s usually ready by the time you’re ready to add it in. And rennet comes in two forms. You can get the tablets, and then you can also get liquid rennet. Either one is fine to use. They both work about the same. I prefer using the tablet rennet. It lasts for up to three years in the freezer, and this little plank of rennet will make 80 gallons worth of milk into cheese.

OK, so I’m going to heat this to 88 to 90. It’s at 80 degrees now. Once it reaches 80, between 80 and 82, you want to keep a pretty close eye on it. And now this water that I’m heating up over here is now at 140, so it should be ready fairly soon. Once it reaches around 170, I’ll go ahead and turn it off. That way if it cools down it’ll still be around 160 when I’m ready to stretch it.

Another thing I a lot of times watch for when I’m making mozzarella is this condensation line right here, because when you first pour your milk in, it will make a straight line right there, but once it reaches around 88 to 90 is when it’ll start to curve in a little bit. See, there’s a little bit there and a little bit over here. If you didn’t have a thermometer, the way you could tell is by going there.

So you can see right here, there’s a real deep one, but it’s at 86 now. And there’s another deep one right here. And it’s right at 88, so I’ll shut it off and you can see there’s not that clear line anymore. It’s going in here and here, and then it’s going in on the other side too. OK, so now that it’s at 88 to 90, I’m going to go ahead and stir in the rennet.

Now, you want to stir this real good before you pour it in to make sure it’s all the way dissolved. Pour that in. Now for this, you want to take out your thermometer, set it on your stove, and then stir this in really well. When you’re making cheese, rennet is what coagulates your milk. And coagulate means it’ll turn it into a solid curd all the way down.

So once you’ve stirred in your rennet, you want to just let it sit undisturbed so that it’ll form that solid curd. If you keep stirring it, you’re going to get a bunch of little bitty curds. And if you take out everything like you’re thermometer, your spoon, all that stuff, it will help to form a solid curd all the way down. So I’m going to let this sit for five minutes, and in that five minutes, it should form a solid curd.

Then I’ll just keep an eye on this while that’s going. This is about 166. I want to bring it a little bit above 160 just so if it’s going to cool down while I’m finishing that up, it’ll still be hot enough to stretch. OK, it’s at 170, so I’ll go ahead and shut it off. And I’m going to keep the thermometer in that so that I can check it again right before I stretch it.

So, while it’s sitting here, it’ll keep heating once you shut it off, and if your milk gets too hot, like if it gets around between 95 to 100, then your rennet will have a hard time setting up, so I usually keep an eye on this. As long as there’s still condensation on the side, I know that it’s still cool enough because this will go away around 98. It’s not quite ready.

When it’s ready, you’ll see, if you can see right in here, when you touch it, it still looks like milk. So what you’re looking for is when you touch it, you want it to spring back. The condensation on the side of your pot will go away around 98 degrees, so as long as you still have it on there while it’s sitting here, then you can know that it’s not getting too hot.

You can test it now. If you put your finger on the top of it, it springs back now. The next thing you’re going to do is cut it like a checkerboard into half inch cubes. So you’ll cut it this way into half inch and this way. And what you’re doing there is you’re increasing the surface area so that the whey will start to come out.

If you want to, you can check it, see if it’s ready. Put your knife in and pull it back a little bit and it pulls away like that. At first, when you first start cutting, sometimes your lines are a little bit hard to see. But it doesn’t have to be terribly precise, so just cut kind of where you think your last line is. But you can see right here that once you cut a line, it’ll start to fill up with whey.

By the time you’re done cutting across this way and you start the horizontal way, then you can start to see all your lines coming. Now, once you start cutting, you can go ahead and turn your heat back onto high, because what we’re going to do now is we’re going to stir this cheese until it reaches 110.

OK, so once you have it cut like a checkerboard, you can go ahead and start stirring. And that will start to expel the rest of the way out from the curds. Once you start stirring it, you want to put your thermometer back in, and you want to keep it stirring because what’s going to happen is right at the bottom, you’re going to get a hot spot, and if you let that cheese sit in that spot, it’ll start melting.

But while you’re stirring, you don’t want to stir too vigorously, because that way you’ll end up with a bunch of very fine curds, and part of the goal in stirring it is you want them to start to clump together. So usually what I do is I take my spoon, you can see I’m starting at the edge, and then work towards the center and then lift them up out of the hot spot.

And then go from the other side and go towards the center, and then lift it up, kind of like I’m folding it to each other. And that’ll help it start to clump together. When I drain it, it’ll clump together into a ball, but it just helps if while you’re stirring it, you don’t end up with a bunch of teeny tiny little curds. OK, so I have the thermometer on, and I’m heating it to 110.

It’s about 98 right now. And you can see the condensation on the side is almost all the way gone now. You want to just keep stirring it through that whole time. You can see as you’re looking at it, you can tell that as I’m starting to star stir it, it’s starting to stretch already some. A two gallon batch of mozzarella will usually yield pretty close to two pounds of mozzarella, maybe a little bit more.

When you’re making soft cheeses, your yield is pretty much one to one. So for every gallon of milk you use, you’ll get a pound of cheese. Sometimes it’s a little bit higher. And you can see in the pot that they’re starting to clump together. And around the edge, you can see how I’m stirring it, there’s starting to be almost like a ring of whey around the outside where there’s no curds. And they’re starting to clump together into a big ball.

Now usually before I start, you want to have a place where you can have a colander set up to drain it in. I have that here. OK, this is really starting to form a ball. You can see as I stir, I’m getting big masses of the cheese. They’re very fine, and if you touch them, they’re real springy. These have a lot of whey in them still, which is why we’re going to drain it into a colander and kind of compress it together.

Because if I was to try and stretch this with all the whey in it and I put this in water, it would just disintegrate into nothing. But when I compress it into the firm ball, you’ll see that it’ll hold up to the water. OK, it’s around 106 now. You can tell that it’s starting to get close when I stir like this, it follows the spoon. And when I lift up, I’ve got a whole big clump of it, because in there I basically have almost the whole ball of cheese.

And once it’s starting to do that, you know that you want to really keep an eye on your temperature because it’s almost there. OK, it’s at 108, and see it’s really sticking to the spoon now. Best mozzarella is made with milk from a local dairy, but you can also use milk from a store. You just want to get it from an organic dairy. OK, this is it, 110.

So I’m going to shut this off, and I’m going to keep stirring it for two minutes. Now what I’m going to try and do during that two minutes is clump it together into as much of a ball as I can get it. You can see now though that you can’t see– if I’m not stirring, you can’t even tell there’s curds in there until I start to stir. Usually I put on gloves at this stage to start forming it into a ball.

You want to put on gloves. You don’t have to, but sometimes it’s a little bit warm at 110. It’s nice to have on gloves so you don’t burn your hands. So you can see, part of it is that I really like the way it feels at this stage. But you can see how all those individual curds that we started out with are starting to clump together. So I just fold it on and start squeezing it together. This part gets a little bit messy.

If you want to, at home sometimes it’s a nice thing to cover your stove with foil or keep a rag on hand. But you can see how I’m gathering it up. I’ll still strain it through the colander–

[TIMER RINGS]

–but at least I’ve got it into more of a ball now. OK, the timer went off, so we’re at the end of our two minutes. So I’m going to go ahead and strain it through the colander. Now, I have most of it into a ball already, but I’ll go ahead and strain it through, because there’s a few little curds down here at the bottom, see. OK, so what you’ll want to do is strain it through your colander once it reaches the 110.

And there’s the cheese. You want to press this into a ball to get all the way out of it. You want to just press it down and then pull it away from the holes. Then once it’s like this where you have a solid piece of cheese, you can go ahead and put it in a bowl, and then it’s ready to stretch. OK, what you’re going to want to do is pour your water that’s 160 over your mozzarella.

It will be hot, so you want to make sure to be careful when you’re pouring it over. You want to make sure it’s totally submerged, and then you want to take it to a sturdy place to stretch it so the water doesn’t– you want to have a bowl of cold water ready, because what that does is once you’re done shaping your mozzarella, that will set the shape.

OK, once you let your hot water sit over it, you’ll want to start to stretch it. Now, you can see at first how it’s all bumpy, and what you’re trying to get is a nice, smooth surface. So you stretch it out as much as you can, and then see how starts to break. Right there, once it starts to break, it’s getting too cold, so you want to put it back in and then do it again.

Now what I like to do is I like to leave the bottom half in so it stays hot, work with the top half, and then flip it over. And what you’re trying to do is create a layered effect. So you’ll fold it back on itself once it starts to get about this thin. Fold it back on itself, form a ball, and then you can stretch it again. You usually want to do that about three or four times to get that nice, smooth surface.

Just press it in, stretch it, then form it into a ball, and then you start stretching it again. You want to make sure that it’s getting hot in the center of your mozzarella. That’s why I flattened it out just a little bit, because sometimes, if you’ve got too round a ball, what happens is the center of it isn’t getting hot, and so when you go to stretch it, it cools down too quick. OK.

Stretch it. See, now it’s starting to really stretch and there’s not nearly the resistance that there was. When it’s really hot enough to stretch and you’re going to get a nice stretch is when you don’t feel like, when you’re stretching it, that you’re fighting with it and you’re having to really pull. It should just stretch easily. This is just about ready. Stretch it one more time.

I’ve got a bunch of little sections now, so I’m going to try and mash it together into a rope for that last stretching, because that way I’ll be able to get it hot all the way around, and it’ll get hotter, easier in the center. It should stretch really nice. Usually for the last stretching, you can leave it in there. You want it pretty hot, so I usually leave in there for about 20 or 30 seconds. OK.

One of the ways you can tell that it’s starting to get close to being ready is when you pull it out, you shouldn’t have to really even pull it for it to start. See? All you’re doing is gravity is pretty much doing it, but it’s doing it without even ripping until it gets too thin. But see, it’s just– that’s ready, because you can stretch it pretty far apart. OK, so then you’ll just fold it back on itself to make a ball for the end.

You can see it’s smooth, there’s not really anymore of those lumps. You want it to get hot all the way through, so you’ll get a nice, smooth ball. So I just press it down. Part of when it’s right before you make your final ball, you want to press it down, and that kind of helps compress all those little rope pieces together. Now, see how that looks? That nice, shiny mother of pearl look is what you’re looking for.

You just take it out and wrap it around. You want to do it kind of like a balloon. Squeeze it together. The nicest ball will come when you really squeeze it tight. Just press it down on itself on the table. Once you’ve got it in the shape that you want, you can go ahead and put it into the cold water. And then you’ll let it sit in there for about 10 minutes.

And that helps hold the shape. If you were just to wrap it up while it’s still warm, it’ll flatten out into a real flat little pancake. And that’s it. You just leave it in here until it cools.

OK, so after it’s sat for 10 minutes in there, you can see now it’s holding its shape much better. You can go ahead and dry it off a little bit on paper towels. Just so it doesn’t hold all that moisture in the plastic wrap. Then go ahead and set it on your plastic wrap. You want to pull this as tight as you can, and then you can just refrigerate it, and there you go. A nice ball of mozzarella that you can go ahead and eat now, or save or later.

OK, so after you’ve strained your mozzarella, you’ll be left with about two gallons of whey. And what you can do is you can then use this whey to make ricotta, whey ricotta. Now, you can’t refrigerate this whey and then use it later on, but if you want to, what I usually like to do is just go ahead and make it right after I’m done. So what you’ll do is just put it in a pot and turn it on to high, and bring it to a boil.

OK, so the whey at first started out that yellow color, and then you can see it turns to this green color once it starts getting up to boiling. It’s starting to boil around the edges there, and you can see the ricotta curds are already starting to form along the edge. So you’ve got some that are already coming. So what you want to do then is to turn off your heat, and then you want to add a third a cup of vinegar to this pot, and that’s what will make the rest of the curds form.

Pour that in, and you want to stir it pretty good. You can stir it. If you stir it and then let it sit for a second, you can see around the edge that the curds are starting to form. When you’re making ricotta, you start out with that yellow whey, then the rest of the proteins are what forms the ricotta, Once you’ve got this green colored whey, you can’t really make anymore cheese with it.

But you can still use the whey that’s left from this for biscuits or pancakes or bread, or whatever you’d like to do. Now, you want to just let this sit. Usually I let it sit for about 10 minutes. It makes a very fine curd, so it takes it a few minutes to form. OK.

So after it’s sat for about 10 minutes, you can see that you have these fine clumps of ricotta floating on top, and so then it’s ready to drain. The way I set this up is I’ll put a big pot. And then for this, you do want a larger colander. Doesn’t have to be quite this big, but you do want a larger one because this drains very slowly. So you want to make sure you have enough space.

And then I just line it with a cheese cloth, because the curds are so fine, and then just pour it in. Now be careful, because this whey has been boiling, and it’s very hot. You want to pour it in kind of slow because what happens is because the curds are so fine, they’ll stick to the edges of the cheese cloth. So what you can do is you kind of pull it away like that. See how they roll off? Pull it over this way.

You don’t want to squeeze it. Most of the time, what everybody wants to do is take it and just squeeze it out. But what that does is that just presses them into the side of the cheese cloth, which makes the problem worse. You can see the whey that’s coming out now is that greenish color. Once you’ve got that greener whey, that last little bit was the finest curds.

Once you have the green whey, you pretty much can’t make anymore cheese out of it, but you can still use it in baking as a milk replacement in your bread, pancakes, biscuits. And see there what I’m doing is I’m rolling it over to a part of the cheese cloth that hasn’t been used as much. You just want to watch it when you do that, that you still have enough of your cheesecloth on the edge of your colander so that it doesn’t fall in.

You won’t get as much from whey ricotta as you do from milk ricotta, but you usually will end up, from a two gallon batch of mozzarella, you’ll usually end up with about a cup or a cup and a half. Scrape that away just a little bit from the edge. You can see how it’s starting to form the curds. Sometimes it helps if you just lift it up from this, just for a minute.

Sometimes the cheese cloth forms like a seal on the inside of the colander, but you don’t want to take it and twist it like this and squeeze it. The nice thing about this is if you make your ricotta right after you make your mozzarella, you have two of the main ingredients you need if you want to make a lasagna. You’ve got your ricotta and your mozzarella right there.

OK, so after you’ve let it sat for your 10 minutes and you come back and you can see it pulling away from the sides of the cheese cloth, it’s ready to go. It’s done, and you can go ahead and just scoop it up into a bowl. Usually what I do is I just kind of roll it onto the spoon. It makes a nice, soft ricotta. You can spice it and use it as a cracker dip, or you can just put it in your refrigerator for use later.

Ricotta, both whey ricotta and milk ricotta freeze very well. So a lot of times what I do is I’ll just put it in a bag, mark it with what it is and the date, and put it in the freezer. And then later on when I need to use it f lasagna or something, I have it ready. And hear it is, and you’ll get about a cup and a half to two cups of ricotta.