On Vox: adventures in cheese making
This weekend I got my fi
rs t opportunity to use my new cheese making kit from the Queen of Cheese. It was a 30 minutes to Mozzarella and Ricotta kit. As excited as I was, I was also a little dubious that it would be quite as easy as they tried to make it seem.
The kit comes with an instruction booklet, rennet tablets, citric acid, "cheese salt", a thermometer, and cheese cloth.
I must say that it was fun, it did take 30 minutes or less, and the cheese is DELICIOUS!
I got 1 gallon of yummy healthy milk from happy cows (ie: no hormones or other yuckiness.) You heat it and add the rennet & citric acid. Then you let it sit for a few minutes- this entire part took maybe 15 minutes tops, as you don't want to heat the milk too quickly.
You get a pot full of curds and whey. The curds you pull out and put in a bowl, and I also saved the whey for making pizza dough later.
The next steps are all about separating the curds and whey. You heat the curds in the microwave a few times, each time kneading it and pouring off the whey. I probably did this about three times.
At that it has most of they whey separated, and the heat makes the cheese
really stretchy, like taffy. It's also pretty hot, which was a little hard to handle, but not too much.
Then you roll it all into a shiny ball and drop that baby in an ice bath. It is ready to eat
maybe five minutes later!
So all in all, this was pretty easy- and will be even easier next time. The kit makes up to 30 lbs of cheese, so I won't need to buy supplies for a while. It took a bit of effort, but saved me money when compared to what cheese costs in the store. And, like I said, it was pretty tasty. Next step: pizza!
Originally posted on rerlin.vox.com