Day 19 - October 19, 2009

Day 19:

Today was mozzarella day. I was really excited about attempting to make some fresh mozzarella today and, well, it was definitely an attempt.

I started off by putting 1 gallon of fresh cow's milk in the steam kettle. I needed to bring the milk up to 162 degrees and then let it cool off to 88 degrees. It took probably a good 30 minutes to an hour to get it that hot (we wanted it to go slow so it didn't scorch the milk) and then I had to figure out how to get it to drop temperatures quickly. That was the trick. I shut off the kettle and just hoped it would drop, but it wasn't. Around the same time as the temperature switch I got a call from Kacean telling me that she got called into work about 3-4 hours early for the day, somebody didn't show up...again. She was loading Ethan at that moment into the car to take him to Ber's house. Ber has a hurt knee and would have a hard time chasing him around for several hours and I knew it wouldn't go well so I started calling around to find someone else who could watch him instead. Traves said he would watch him on Monday's but I could not get a hold of him and Kace couldn't get a hold of him. I got a hold of my brother Ty and he agreed to watch him until he had to leave for work. That was good for the moment, but I was not convinced that I would be finished by then to pick Ethan up. I called around again. My mom was busy, Traves still didn't answer so I called Mart. He left work 3 hours early and came to school to switch me cars because he didn't have the carseat and he was off to pick up Ethan. All the while I was rushing to cool off my cheese in case I had to get going right then. I put a frozen tube thing in the milk to help bring down the temperature really quickly and once it hit 88 degrees it was time to add the rennet tablets and the citric acid. At that point it was supposed to sit for 15 minutes.

15 minutes later I was to bring the cheese to 98 degrees and hold it at that temp for 15 more minutes while it curdled. Stressing over a babysitter while making cheese is not a good combination. I was focusing more on the babysitter issue and not as much on the thermometer and the milk and ended up cooking the cheese at too hot of a temperature making it so the cheese reacted funny and it didn't work properly. We pulled out the curds, drained them and tried to work them into balls but the cheese just wasn't stringy or sticking together. It was more like ricotta cheese curds than anything. We soaked it in hot water to cook the cheese and it still didn't do anything. Bummer.

After fiddling around with it for a while, we knew it just wasn't going to work and it was pointless to keep trying and we settled for trying to make ricotta out of the whey from the mozzarella. Yeah...that didn't work either. Rex just started dumping ingredients into the pan and added the vinegar too early causing it to curdle before it reached temperature. Cheese #2 didn't work either. *Sigh*

Tomorrow we will try again using a double boiler instead of a steam kettle. The good thing about tomorrow is Kacean doesn't have to work so I shouldn't have to stress about a babysitter during crucial temperature points of the cheese. I hope she doesn't get called in again!