Dan is the Man!

Dan is the man because his grocery store actually had rennet tablets, derived from the intestinal mucosa of calves. This is significant because it is required for making cheese, a project I have been looking forward to since we got internet in the apartment. We went to 3 other stores first, but finally found it at Dan's. Yeah!!! So the cheese I was looking at making is mozzarella.





This is calcium chloride, a chemical sometimes added to homogenized milk to make it better for cheezing (The homogenization makes the fat particles smaller and harder to globulize [made up word] and can lead to worse cheese) I didn't use it this round though, maybe I should have.

A bread I made yesterday and left in the fridge to bake today. It turned out very pretty and quite tasty, I am getting a better idea about this bread thing, even if it is taking me a bit longer than I would have liked.

So the idea behind mozzarella is to acidify warmed milk with citric acid (most normal cheeses are acidified by lactic acid bacteria which create an acid as a metabolic byproduct). Rennet is added to stabilize the resulting curdled milk.
This is the stage where the milk has separated into the curds (little white clumps) and whey, a yellowish translucent liquid. My cheese here has curds that are way too small, probably because I added the citric acid too quickly. At any rate, the resulting concoction is cooked to further separate the solid and liquid phases.

The whey is strained from the curds and left to drain for a while, you then salt and microwave the curd, which expels more whey and makes the curd stretchy and elastic, which can be formed into a ball.
My formed mozzarella ball flattened a bit, but tastes awesome with some black pepper and olive oil on my latest bread :) Success!!!