Truly Homemade Pizza
This weekend we tried our hand at making mozzarella cheese. This kit cost $25 and will make 6 pounds of cheese. It was over $30 after shipping and handling, and we’ll have to buy six gallons of fresh milk. That might sound like a lot of effort and money for so little product, but it would cost us over $90 to buy that much fresh mozzarella from the grocery store. So it’s a good deal — if the cheese tastes good.
The kit came from Leeners.com.It includes all the acids and enzymes to turn milk into cheese
First add the calcium chloride, citric acid, and lipase powder to whole milk.
Heat the mixture to 88 degrees and add half of a rennet tablet.
This will help develop the curd and separate it from the whey.
This recipe allows you to use the microwave to helpconsolidate the curd and extract the whey.
(You can use the leftover whey to make ricotta cheese)
After melting the curds in the microwave, you add a
little salt and start kneading and stretching the cheese.
little salt and start kneading and stretching the cheese.
It’s really coming together well.
Here’s our fresh Mozzarella Ball.
It ended up tasting more like string cheese than fresh mozzarella. Delicious nonetheless, considering it only took about 25 minutes and was a lot of fun.
We figured the best way to use our new cheese was to make Margherita pizza, and we just had to make fresh crust too! Here’s the pizza dough recipe we used.
Here I am manually dissolving the yeast.Getting your hands dirty is the key to good dough.
Kneading the dough…
Trying to twirl the dough like the pizza places.(I obviously need more practice)
Here’s our pizza with homemade crust, fresh mozzarella,puréed tomato, and dried basil from last season’s garden.
My husband wasn’t very happy with the mozzarella, so he spent most of the next day working on this mozzarella recipe from Gourmet Magazine. The first steps are similar to what you saw above, except everything takes much, much longer.
Instead of melting the cheese in the microwave,you hang it in cheesecloth for 3 hours to let the whey drain off.
Voilà!
These cheese balls were very difficult to pull together, but they came out even softer than the fresh mozzarella from the store.
We decided the recipe from Gourmet was fantastic, but way too cumbersome. Next time we’ll stick to the Leener’s recipe, but keep the kneading and stretching to a minimum. And if we accidentally overwork it, we’ll just stretch it into a long coil and call it string cheese.
Who doesn’t like string cheese?