No Whey, It’s Monsterella!!! (Was that too cheesy?)

Ingredients:

• 1/2 and 1/8 cup bottled (NOT TAP) distilled water
• 1/2 gallon milk, raw
• 3/4 tsp teaspoon citric acid
• 1/8 rennet tablet or 1/8 teaspoon liquid rennet (Not Junket rennet)
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

On this, the last day of February, Jake and I got to make mozzarella cheese with raw milk. It was a really fun process! We started by making mixtures of water and citric acid and water and rennet. We heated the raw milk mixed with the citric acid mix until it reached 90 degrees F, stirring the whole time.

Stirring the milk and citric acid

Heating to 90

We took the milk off the heat and added the rennet, stirring for 30 seconds. Covering it and letting it sit. We let our milk sit for 15 minutes to ensure that we had stiffer curds, so they would be silken like tofu. Once the curds were set, we cut them in a grid pattern.

First cuts

Making it a checkerboard

We moved it back to the heat and stirred it until it was 105 degrees F, stirring gently as to not break up the curds too much, allowing them to start clumping into the style of mozzarella.

Stirring the curds

After it reached 105 degrees, we removed it from the heat and stirred for another 5 minutes. Then, we strained the curds from the whey.

Straining

We separated the two fully from each other.

Curds and Whey

We put the curds in the microwave for a minute, drained the newly released whey, and folded the curds over themselves a little.

Folding the curds

We put the curds back in the microwave for thirty seconds for them to reach 135 degrees F. We then stretched and folded the curds over themselves until they could be formed into a nice ball of mozzarella.

Folding the dough

Stretching and forming

We added the salt to the cheese and mixed it in.

Squishing in the salt

After the salt was well incorporated, we formed some mini mozzarella balls as well as one big one, and we cut the big one in half to see the inside of it.

Look at her shine

Cut in half

Pasteurized versus Raw

They were delicious!

1. What are curds and whey? provide a chemical explanation

Curds are made of denatured and coagulated casein and are acid insoluble. It is a soft, white, solid substance formed when milk has an acid added to it. Whey is the yellowish liquid that makes up the other part of milk that is acid soluble. The proteins in whey are unaffected by the acid that creates the curds.

2.Why did you add “acid” to the milk? provide a chemical explanation.

Acid being added to milk causes the casein in the milk to denature, unfolding, and then they coagulate and form the larger globs that are the curds formed in milk.

3. What is rennet? And what was the purpose of adding it?

Rennet is an enzyme that is found in the stomach of baby cows (can be made from vegetables too) that break apart the milk proteins by cutting the negatively charged tails off of the casein so that they can coagulate and form the curds, which causes the separation of the curds and whey so you can take just the curds to form the mozzarella.

4. Some of the class used “raw” milk today – that is, milk that has not been pasteurized, but was obtained personally by Dr. C from a certified, FDA approved farm and refrigerated continuously (for 2 days) until lab today. What differences could we expect from cheesemaking with raw milk?

The curds will form easier in the raw milk than they will in the pasteurized milk because of natural bacteria occurring in the milk that is killed when it is pasteurized. Raw milk has bacteria still in it that are not killed since it is not pasteurized, so the formation of the curds in raw milk will be quicker than in the pasteurized milk and the cheese will form easier and be an easier made cheese.