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[intro music]
>> ELLA: Hey guys. It’s Ella again from MakeCheese.ca, here to help you find your
inner cheese-maker.
Today we are going to be making the most talked about cheese: Mozzarella.
I’m very very excited to do this with you guys, and just so you’re ready and you have
everything you need, check out the list below of ingredients and supplies, or download a
very handy recipe pdf.
Let’s get started.
We’re going to start off with 4 litres of milk.
This is just cow’s milk. You can make Mozzarella with goat’s milk, however, it tends to be
a little bit delicate when it comes to the stretching stage.
Remember, you can make it with Skim milk all the way up into high percentages of fat. I
like to make this with like a 3.25% milk.
So we have our milk. And we’re just simply going to add our first ingredient, which is
citric acid. Citric acid is really what’s going to lower the ph of our curd, and is
going to give us a nice stretch.
Please follow along with the recipe to find out exactly all the measurements and everything
we’re doing. We’re just going to give that a stir.
You’re going to add that to your milk. Remember, you’re adding acid to milk here, so you’re
milk is going to get a little bit of a shock, so I like to stir as I add it, just so it
kind of disperses evenly within the milk.
And from this point on, I’m going to be heating it on medium heat all the way up to
90 fahrenheit.
Alright, so, we’ve reached 90, which is great. At this point, we’re going to take
the pot off the heat. And now for the exciting part: we’re going to add our rennet to the
milk.
Now remember, rennet wants to turn your milk from liquid form into curd. So if we start
over stirring here, we’re actually going to be working against rennet, and you’re
going to get a weaker curd, a weaker set, and you’ll probably lose some flavour here.
So, I want you to stir for no longer than 20 seconds. A cheese making technique is to
do a top-down stirring, so you pull the milk from the top all the way to bottom, bottom
all the way up to the top. You take your spoon out.
Now that our rennet’s in, we’re going to wait 12 to 20 minutes for our curd to set.
Now that we’ve waited, we’re going to now check to see if our curd is ready. So
with a long knife, what I want you to look for is: sometimes the curd likes to pull away
from the side of the pot. And, that’s a good sign that it has already formed its own
mass. Another way of checking the curd is sticking a knife into the curd. If you sway
it back and forth a little bit and you can already tell that it’s already pushing up
against your knife. That’s an excellent sign. And if you pull out your knife, you
can actually see a knife mark left in the curd, which is excellent. So this curd is
ready to cut.
I want to cut it like a checkerboard pattern. So you want to cut four lines, or five, all
the way down to the bottom of the pot. And then you want to cut the opposite way, just
like a checkerboard.
And you have a faint little grid line. Now at this point, the curd is a little weak,
so we wouldn’t be able to scoop it out and start making Mozzarella with it. How to make
curd stronger is to apply a little more heat. So we’re going to put it back on the heat.
And the heat, what it does, it starts to shrink the curd slightly. So our grid pattern is
going to get more and more defined with the heat.
Instead of stirring it, you want to push it, because at this point it’s still a little
weak. So if we stirred it, we’d break it up and we’d lose a lot of flavor and it
would become brittle.
What I like to do is give it a little push, right through the middle of the pot. And that,
to me, gives a little bit of a gauge, is it falling apart, is it really delicate. And
you can see, some of it is breaking apart. That just means that we’re going to give
it a little more time. And you can watch - remember we ended at 90 fahrenheit, we’re going to
heat this curd all the way up to 105 fahrenheit.
So as your temperature rises, you’ll notice that the curd kind of resists a little bit
more to your stirring. It’s not weak, it starts to mat together, it’s actually firming
up with the heat.
So just continue to kind of push it. An important stir, too, is to try to push it from the bottom,
because that’s where all the heat is, push just to release all that heat. And that also
gives you an accurate way of the reading the temperature. So if I were just sticking my
temperature in there without stirring, I’d get a totally different temperature than if
I stirred from the bottom to release all that heat. Then I read the temperature, it’s
probably going to drop because I’ve released the heat and I’ve distributed the heat.
So it’s really looking nice. And a good sign is that you can see a clear whey. If
your whey is really milky looking, that means that you’re stirring a little too hard and
that you’re losing a lot of the fat, and it’s clouding up your liquid whey and you’re
going to lose some flavour at that point.
So we’re just going to stir. Remember, we’re going to 105. And if you’re stirring and
you’re still a little worried, like “my curd still feels a little weak,” remember
we’re going to heat it to 110. And 110, that extra little bit of heat is going to
help firm it up a little bit.
So, we’re just stirring. You can tell that it’s a little more its own mass, and it’s
not breaking apart.
I just like to check in once and a while to see where my heat is at. We’re getting close.
I’m just going to turn it up a little bit.
We’ve now reached 105, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to take the pot
off the heat. And now we’re going to simply transfer all of the curd. We’re going to
transfer it into our colander. Just one scoop at a time.
It’s heavy.
With 4 litres of milk, it’s normal to get roughly around 400 grams to 500 grams of cheese.
That works out to being about 6 or 7 of this size of Mozzarella ball.
Now that we’ve scooped all of the Motsa out, it’s just going to sit and drain happily
over there. And remember, now, we are going to now heat our whey, and this is going to
become our hot water bath. So this is now going to act as, I guess, a microwave of sorts.
And we’re going to be taking a scoop of our curd, loading up our spoon, immersing
it in the whey, waiting until it heats up, pulling it out, and stretching it.
From this point forward, this is the art of Mozzarella. This is the art of the stretching
and getting the right heat on your curd to get the right stretch.
We’re going to heat our whey up to 185 fahrenheit. And to do that, just to speed this up, you
can heat up the entire pot of whey, or you camp dump out half, and then it’s a little
faster - you’re not heating a whole entire pot of whey. Or you can put a lid on the pot,
and that speeds it up as well. What you don’t want to do is you don’t want to heat it
until it boils over and turn your back on it. So let’s just be careful there.
So we’re going to turn it on high.
Now that we’ve reached 185, we’re going to turn the heat off. This is the exciting
part. The most common question I get is “how long should I heat my curd up for?” Well,
my curd might be very sensitive to heat, while another person’s curd might need a lot of
heat. So, what I want you to learn on your first piece is use your first curd piece as
almost like a tester.
You’re going to load up your spoon with curd. And this piece of curd is going to give
you a sense of if you’re curd is reacting well to the heat. You’re going to immerse
it completely under the whey. And your curd could start floating around, and you’re
just going to hover around with it.
I want you to peak in on it, so you’ll lift it up. And if you see that your curd is still
pretty much looking like the same way it looked before you added it to the heat, that means
that it needs a little bit more time in there.
You kind of want to lift up your curd, and you want to see that it’s sort of started
to melt slightly. That’s a good sign that the heat’s working its way throughout the
whole piece.
So I’ll pull it up, and what I’ve done is I’ve added some cold water to a bowl
on the side here. And this is for my hands, because if I just went and grabbed this curd,
I’d be in a lot of trouble, I’d be experiencing a lot of heat on my hands. So you want to
dip your hands into the cold water, pull it out, and go ahead and try and pick it up.
If it’s super hot, you can dip you hand back into the cold, but remember every time
you add cold water, and the longer it’s out of the pot, the faster your curd’s cooling
down. So you’re losing a lot of heat here. As I’ve been talking, I’ve lost a lot
of heat. So as I go do knead the curd, I might get a nice firm curd, but I might not bring
out the shine and the kind of smoothness of the curd. So just because I’ve talked a
lot, I’m going to put it back in the heat just because I know I’ve lost a lot of heat
during that time. Just going to heat it up a little bit more. Dipping my hand in the
cold water, picking it up.
I want you to look at the kneading technique. You want to knead your thumbs, pull it, you
want to fold it like a book, pull it slightly, fold it like a book, push your thumbs in,
see how I’m getting that stretch there, fold it like a book, see how the shine is
coming out of it. Now remember, we’re losing heat here, so if I kept kneading it, I might
get a really wrinkly surface, so I quickly want to shape it. And you can pull the skin
around the ball there. And you can tuck those ugly sort of tattered bits underneath it,
so they’re kind of on the bottom side of it. On the top, you have a perfect, smooth,
shiny surface, where on the bottom I’ve kind of tucked those little tattered pieces
in.
And there you have it.
Now, the questions we get are “what if I don’t make a first, beautiful, shiny piece
of Mozzarella on my first dip?” Well that’s okay. If this looked really wrinkly or if
I didn’t get the shape or the shine or the look I wanted, you can put it back on your
spoon and you just dip it a second time. However, the more you dip, the more rubbery the texture
it’ll feel in your mouth, and you’ll lose a little bit of flavour every time you dip
it into the whey.
So the art of Mozzarella is to get the right bounce and the consistency, the shine, and
the shape in as little dips as possible.
So there’s my first piece. Now I’m going to set that aside.
I’m going to show you one more time here. We’ll try a bigger piece. If you had a bigger
piece of curd, a bigger piece of curd is going to take more time in the heat. Again, I’m
dipping it in. From time to time you can check the temperature of your whey. It’s important
that your whey temperature stay around 185, because if it starts cooling down, it’s
going to be harder and harder to get that nice shine to come out in your cheese. So
you want to keep a nice hot whey. If you need to, you can turn back on the heat.
So again, this doesn’t really look like it’s affected by the heat, it doesn’t
look like it’s started to melt, so I’m going to put it back in the heat and let it
heat up a little more.
We’ll try that.
I’m going to pick that up. I’m going to start to knead it, push it with my thumbs,
fold it, fold it. Okay, I have the shape I want. If I don’t like the surface of it,
again, a nice way of doing it is to push it through the kind of okay symbol of your fingers.
You can tell here that it’s starting to kind of like split apart and tear. Tearing
and it splitting apart like that is actually a sign that your curd has gotten too cold.
So I needed to put more heat on this curd to actually make it stretch and more malleable
in my hand. You can tell even to touch that it’s too cold. And if I kept kneading it
and kneading it and kneading it, I wouldn’t actually make it a prettier or nicer cheese,
I’d just keep making it more rubbery. So what I need to tell myself is that it’s
cooled down, stop kneading it, kneading it won’t help, heat is the only thing that’s
going to help it at this point. so you’re going to put it back in, heat it up again,
and that extra little heat is going to help it become a nice, shiny Mozzarella ball.
So I’m going to take it out. And this is the second dip, so I’m going to try and
make it so that I don’t have to dip it a third time. So again, folding it, as fast
as I can before it loses any more heat. We’re losing a little bit of - there we go - perfect.
So here’s a bigger piece. I’m going to dip my hands in, I’m going to grab, put
my spoon down. And sometimes that’s all you’re going to can on your first dip is
just the firmness of it. Sometimes your curd is too delicate and the first dip, all you
did is make it a firmer piece of cheese. If you can get the firmness you want and the
look you want on the first dip, that’s awesome.
So, I got the firmness I wanted, but you can tell it’s sort of still wrinkly and a little
bit broken. It cooled down really quickly there. So that’s when you can decide: am
I fine with this, do I want to make it look perfect and beautiful? I could just stop here
and say “that’s beautiful Mozzarella.” If you’re really into the look and shine
of it, then you can do a second dip. But remember the second dip you’re going to lose some
of that texture. You’ll notice it won’t be as bouncy as maybe the other pieces, and
that’s noticeable when you go to eat it.
Put some more heat on it. Pull it out. And, see how I can get a stretch here, if I wanted
to. If i had more heat, it would get more and more and more and more stretchy. It’s
tearing there in the middle, that mean’s it’s cooling down. At this point, you can
be really creative with whatever shape you want: you can braid it, you can tie it in
little knots.
So, there is another completed piece.
Yum yum.
[singing]
Okay, here, on this piece I want to talk to you guys how you can flavor or salt your cheese.
If I had salt here, you could sprinkle a little bit of salt in, and then knead it into your
cheese. Fold it over, I’d sprinkle salt on, and knead it again, sprinkle your seasoning,
and knead it again.
Another way of salting, is you’d put 2 or 3 tablespoons of salt into your whey and it
would act as a salt water bath for it. Some people like that way because you get a more
subtle salty taste to it. I like actually making all of my cheese not putting salt in,
and then just before I eat it I sprinkle on balsamic or seasoning or salt onto the cheese
that way.
So, I got the shape I wanted, so I’m going to do a second dip. I’m going to pull it
out, get a little bit more heat. And again, this curd doesn’t need a lot of heat, but
your curd may need a little more. You might need up to 40, 45, to a minute in your hot
whey.
Take it out. It’s a little bit easier to work with now with more heat. And I’m going
to shape it the way that I want. Sometimes I’m not super picky on the look of it, and
I’m happy just to have, just to stop so I don’t lose out on the texture of it. There’s
another.
Now these, all of the one’s we’ve made, these will keep for ten days in the fridge.
It’s a good idea to cover these for the next 3 hours in water, so you’d cover just
in tap water. They’d sit in your fridge for 3 hours. After 3 hours, they will have
firmed up thanks to the cold water and the fridge temperature. And then you’ll take
each one or all of them and keep them in a tupperware or any sealed container. And if
you’re concerned that they’re going to dry out, you can also wrap them individually
in plastic wrap. That helps keep them nice and moist.
There you have it guys. That’s Mozzarella for you. If you have any questions, please
see our Frequently Asked Questions page or email us anytime.
I hope this video helped, and thanks again. Take care.
[outro music]