Homemade Mozzarella

This past weekend when I went up to Arthur Avenue, I mentioned that I bought 2 pounds of cheese curds as well as fresh mozzarella from Casa Della Mozzarella. This week I made a couple attempts to make mozzarella in my own kitchen. The first one failed miserably and while the cheese had great flavor it had the texture of a car tire. I promptly tossed it away and decided to try with the curds again last night following the recipe from Fias Co Farms.

This version turned out much better because I made some pretty key mistakes the first time around. A lot of recipes said to “knead” the curds. This just resulted in just squeezing out all the buttery deliciousness. I had a gut feeling I was doing something wrong at the time, but I was already committed to the first recipe by that point. The recipe from Fias Co Farms correctly emphasized that you should not squeeze and instead very gently stretch the curds. It should actually pretty much be able to stretch itself by its own weight. My stretching technique was not nearly as awesome as the photos in the recipe I was following, but it was much better than the first time around.

The result was an amazingly stringy, soft, creamy ball of delicious mozzarella in my fridge. Well, half of it was in my fridge. The other half was quickly consumed. It doesn’t look as pretty as what you get in the store but it tastes damn good.

The texture is much better than before, but still could use a bit of an improvement. I still have about 3/4 of a pound left of curds so I am going to try again on Sunday or Monday and hopefully that will the final round.

In case you are interested, Fias Co Farms has a large section dedicated to homemade dairy products.