Do you know what takes about 30 minutes to make from start to finish? Fresh Mozzarella. Not counting the time to hunt down some not-so-everyday ingredients because I'm realize I'm the only one who didn't have the sense to order rennet and citric acid online or the patience to wait the few days for it to arrive. Nope, when I decided it was time to try it was time to try.....that day.
I found the rennet relatively easy enough but there was some person just ahead of me looking for the citric acid. Every place I called I was told that somebody had just called about that the other day and how odd that was to have two people wanting the same strange item. When I finally found a place that carried it I found that my fellow impatient cheese maker beat me to it and bought the last two containers of citric acid. How rude! I'm quite positive one would have done it for him and he could have left the other for me.
By employing google skills that only seem to surface in times of great frustration, I soon found out citric acid is used in a lot of East European and Jewish foods but they call it sour salt. Aha! Lucky for me, the next town over (less than 2 miles away) is a predominantly Jewish town. Hurrah! I looked up the number for the kosher grocer and sure enough they had some. I had some in my hands within ten minutes. For the record--that kosher grocer had dozens of containers of sour salt (citric acid). Dozens.
I simultaneously wanted to call all the places I had called earlier and tell them where to find citric acid for future answers to future calls from aspiring cheese makers AND keep the knowledge of this hidden cache of citric acid to myself.
Making mozzarella is very easy. If you can heat milk slowly to a certain degree, stir, make use of a colander and employ old skills learned during the Play doh years to shape a ball then you can make mozzarella. I used a recipe from the New England Cheese Making Supply Company.
Jiggling the pot of fresh cut curds is great fun. A little trippy, I'd say. I couldn't stop and kept on until one cube sunk alarmingly out of sight. I got back to business.
I wasn't so sure how appealing lots of pictures of blobby white things would be appealing to look at here at Vanilla Icing so I just sort of skipped ahead to the part where I grated up my cheese.
And here it is on fresh made pizza! I'm proud to say that this pizza has dough, sauce AND now cheese made by me. With luck, sometime in the summer that sauce will be made from tomatoes, oregano and basil I grew. Now only to grow the wheat for the dough...and install a cow in my back yard for the milk. =) No one will notice a cow in my tiny, city back yard....right? Right???
