Cooking has been foreign to me for the last few months. I don’t have an aversion to it, but I’ve just been eating out or at work more often lately. I dare say my reentry to the cooking world scores high on style points. I read an article in the Bold Italic about Antonia Richmond’s adventures in cheese making around San Francisco. Having a love of cheese and just having moved to the city, I was inspired to also attempt a simple Mozzarella. Rob was enthusiastic to make cheese too when I mentioned it to him, so it was set, Sunday afternoon we were to make cheese.

According to the article and other Internet wisdom, making cheese at home can be pretty tricky–but Mozzarella seems within reach. I purchased the liquid vegetable rennet and some calcium chloride at Rainbow Grocery, and Rob acquired the requisite high quality fresh milk. Bi-Rite has a kit which includes everything needed except for the milk, but it cost more than twice as much as the separate ingredients, and we already had a thermometer. The list of ingredients was not long, but the process did require a commitment to stirring. Rob got the recipe and milk, I got the weird cheese making stuff.

So we poured in the milk and calcium chloride and nothing much happened. We stirred and heated for a while before it was time to add the rennet. A little bit of that stuff, and a few seconds of stirring and something weird happened. It was as if we were making cheese! The milk turned to curd, and we had made some real progress.

Despite the fact that the recipe seemed to call for breaking up the solid pieces whenever we thought we were finally making progress, we persevered. We stirred and stirred and eventually we had cooked it enough. We hung the cheese to dry. When it had fully drained, we cut the mass of curds into slices. The questionable recipe now indicated we should microwave it until it just starts to melt, then quickly stretch it and work it into a ball. Gloves are recommended, because the cheese is hot at this point, but having no gloves, nor interest in wearing gloves, an alternate technique was needed. Adapting a trick I heard about this summer, I ran my hands under cold water for a few seconds, then picked up the cheese and pulled it. As soon as I started to feel the burning again, I set it down and ran my hands under cold water. After a few stretch and fold cycles it had clearly become something new; real fresh mozzarella. After a cold saltwater bath it was ready to marinade and eat!

I think next time we’ll stretch it less, because it was a bit tough, but delicious other than that. Overall, it was a success.

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