Attempted Mozzerella

A couple weeks ago I tried making homemade mozzarella. Niki made it sound so easy on the Serious Eats blog!  I bought the citric acid and the rennet on amazon, got the non-UHT whole milk, I was ready to go.

Maybe I’m just bad at following directions, but when I tried to make the mozz, it did not produce a smooth ball of stringy fresh cheese. It was crumbly, like ricotta, and didn’t have any stretch in it. According to SeriousEats, this happens when your milk isn’t up to par. Which makes sense because I didn’t go out of my way to find the freshest milk, and settled for Stop and Shop brand Whole milk (which is non-UHT/non-ultra-pasturized).

Ultimately, the cheese wasn’t a total loss – I packed it into a ball and it hardened into a crumbly cotija-like mound. the flavor was pretty good – like a crumbly mozzarella.  I crumbled it onto salads, and it was not bad! But definitely not as good as stringy fresh mozzarella would have been.

Stay tuned for the second attempt, which will be posted here (whenever I figure out how to ACTUALLY make non-crumbly mozzarella)!  Now that I have my hands on a bottle of rennet and a bag of citric acid, it’s only a matter of time before my kitchen turns into a mozzarella factory.

Have you [un]successfully made mozzarella? What worked, what didn’t?  I could use any advice. 🙂