Friday, May 21, 2010

Today's mozzarella

Sucked just as much as yesterday's. In fact, it was the exact same texture as yesterday's: chewy, rubbery... as I chewed, all of the fat and liquid came out of the cheese, leaving behind a protein mass.

I'm running through all of the suggestions out there. The number one suggestion seems to be that the milk is heated too high when pasteurized. Today I attempted the cheese with raw milk. Absolutely no difference. In fact, it was the exact same results that I had gotten when I originally tried to do the recipe with storebought cow milk. So now I know that this was not the problem either.

Another suggestion on the Cheesemaking.com website was that the cheese is handled too much after cutting the curds.  I barely agitated it after I cut the curd. When I say barely I mean that the only time I agitated them  is when I stuck the thermometer in the whey, draining off the way, putting the curds in the way to get them to stretch and shaping into a ball.

I can not ever get my curds to stretch, especially the way she does in the pictures. And I cannot get my balls to form all smooth and shiny, as in her pictures.

I noticed that she had mentioned on her site that her 30 minute moz is not the same as the recipe in the book. She said you cannot store the 30 minute recipe in brine like you can with the recipe in the book. Hmmm... so that tells me that perhaps her beautiful photos are of her other recipe, not the 30 minute one.

I'm beginning to think it is just a bum recipe.

2 comments:

Vegetable Garden Cook said...

I decided to see what would happen with no citric acid. Very similar but a little more chewy.

Anonymous said...

I wonder if there is a hotline you can call. Or email... I bet your issues are common ones and can be overcome with some minor tweaking--at least this is my hope. Fingers are crossed.