Cheesy Cacoethes

Don't we all just love Dictionary.com? Having downloaded its excellent app onto my Smartyphone, I now look forward every morning to the always-stimulating Word of the Day. Yesterday, it was cacoethes. Could there be a more appropriate term for the way I feel about cheesemaking at the moment? I think not.

I'm obsessed to the point where the local dairy herds are having trouble keeping up, as shall be demonstrated below.

When we last visited my rennet-soaked story arc, I was pondering how to optimize my mozzarella-making technique to the point where I felt confident about which ingredients to include in my recipe; the ease and effectiveness of my overall procedure; and my ability to control (within reason) the texture of the final product. Many gallons of raw milk and pounds upon pounds of fresh formaggio later, I believe I have well and truly achieved my goal, able as I now am to produce excellent mozzarella on demand - admittedly, with some minor variations between batches.

There's no problem with that, right? If I wanted it to be exactly the same every time, I could always pop to the supermarket just down the street, which sells processed, shredded mozzarella cheese helpfully coated in powdered cellulose and treated against infection with natamyacin - and 29 whole cents cheaper for half a pound!

For my final experiments (although, it must be said, I imagine I will continue to tweak my recipe until I pop my clogs), I was worryingly unable to procure my favorite raw milk from the loyal Jersey cows up the road, as an impending blizzard had prompted a run on their dairy. I was therefore obliged to travel somewhat farther afield (in this selfsame storm, which was an adventure in itself - but I will endure just about any hardship when fresh cheese is at stake), to visit a farm where the bovines are of the Holstein breed, the world's highest milk-yielders (according to Wikipedia, anyway). I was curious to see whether the difference in milk would have an appreciable effect on my mozzarella production.

I won't keep you in suspense. It didn't.

Here is the procedure and recipe that is working for me. It yields flavorful, moist cheese that can be produced in about half an hour. I have borrowed heavily from the Wait and See Method popularized by the Cheese Queen with a few tweaks here and there to suit my own purposes. A gallon of raw milk produces about one pound of cheese - which works out to $3 for 8 oz. of cheese, with not a speck of potato starch to be found. It seems to keep well when stored tightly-wrapped in the fridge, although it isn't really lasting long enough chez Fractured Amy to be positive about this.

Home-Made Mozzarella Cheese

• 1/4 rennet tablet dissolved in 1/4 cup of cool water
• 1.5 teaspoons citric acid dissolved in 3/4 cup of cool water
• 1/4 teaspoon powdered lipase dissolved in 1/4 cup of cool water
• 1 gallon of raw milk (you can pasteurize it yourself if you wish)
• 1 teaspoon cheese salt

Pop a candy thermometer into a spaghetti pot (I used my small 8-quart straight-sided one). Pour in the milk, the citric acid mixture, and the lipase mixture. Blend it all together vigorously. Bring the milk up to 88 deg F over medium heat, stirring now and then. Nothing will seem to happen up to this point, and that's just fine and dandy.

Remove the pot from the heat and add the rennet. Stir thoroughly but slowly just until you think the rennet is evenly distributed (less than 30 seconds). Clap a lid on the pot and walk away for ten minutes. I used the time to organize my spice cupboard, which was overflowing with jars of cumin and redundant bottles of sherry peppers. I also  discovered an unopened jar of whole Tellicherry peppercorns, which I was then able to cross off the shopping list. I am nothing if not a multi-tasker!

When you get back to the pot, it will still look like nothing has happened. Do not be deceived! What you actually have is a big pot of milky custard that you can jiggle if you wish or cut with a knife.

Do the slicing thing now: take a long carving knife and cut through the curd to make cuboid shapes. Make sure you cut all the way to the bottom of the pot! The resulting scraping noise, I assure you, is worse than fingernails on a chalkboard (not that anybody knows what one of those is, anymore).

Return your pot to medium heat and bring it up to 100 deg F, stirring very gently with an extremely long-handled wooden spoon. It only takes a few minutes. You will see the curds separate from the whey and begin to look like floating cheese - be careful, or you will destroy the delicate web of casein particles. When 100 deg. F has been reached, remove the pot from the heat and continue to swirl the curds around for an additional two or three minutes. They will firm up, and you will realize that it has become a simple matter to pour off the whey and decant the cheese into a colander.

Plop the resulting drained curds into a glass bowl and put it in your microwave. Zap it for one minute. Remove it, drain off the excess whey, add the cheese salt, and fold it in with your silicon spatula. Return to the microwave and zap it again until it reaches 130 deg F, or is hot and slightly sticky but still handleable. Remove the cheese to a big cutting board.

Now you have to stretch the cheese, otherwise it's not mozzarella. This is a key contributor to the texture of the final product, although it's not nearly as occult a process as some would have you believe. What you do is, you take the hot cheese and fold it over on itself a few times until it has the texture you desire and it starts to look a bit glossy. The length of time and vigor with which you apply youself to the task are crucial to the final formaggio outcome. For a soft, homogenous, creamy cheese, work it barely at all. For firmer cheese with definite strings, stretch it a bit more. This part is trial and error, but I have discovered that you can produce two very different cheeses from the same batch once you get the hang of it: this is important in a family where preferences are strong and varied.

For this batch, the cheese at 5 o'clock was flopped only three or four times, and formed while still quite hot. The cheese at 11 o'clock was pulled and stretched until strings formed, then coiled when cooler. A close-up of the latter, more fibrous specimen shows what I'm talking about:

Isn't that cool? Same procedure, right until the cheese was brought to 130 deg. in the microwave.

When you have finished stretching your cheese and formed it into whatever shapes suit your fancy, submerge them in an icy bath to cool them down and firm up their shape.

Believe me - you will be glad you saved yourself a trip to the supermarket.