Grains, Grains, Go Away

For my last class of the summer series, I saved the most popular cheese: Mozzarella. It was the most well-attended class of the three, as I had expected. It's trickier than ricotta. It's more hands-on than yogurt. And once you start stretching it, you realize it's also undeniably fun. You feel like you really accomplished something with that milk when you finish a batch and wrap up your little mozzarella ball baby to sleep in the fridge.

We cheated for the sake of time and used citric acid instead of starter cultures, but I was still able to tie together all the science nuggets about fermentation, pH, enzymes, and milk composition from previous classes. In that sense, my cheese curriculum was a success. Yet, for this last cheese, it became clear what you can and cannot get away with in the cheese vat. While it may not be consistent in flavor and quality, cheese is usually pretty forgiving of mistakes. You'll end up with something resembling a dairy solid, whether it's edible or not. With mozzarella your pratfalls aren't as easy to dust off when you can't even accomplish the final glorious step of stretching the cheese. The entire reason mozzarella is so much fun to make!

When one of my group's cheese stretched but the other group's didn't, I realized that teaching cheesemaking with half-assed ingredients is much different from making-do in your own kitchen with the same half-assed ingredients. With the latter, nobody is there to share in your embarrassment. It is impossible to teach someone perfection while equipping them with imperfect tools and REALLY imperfect milk.

I've had my fair share of mozzarella failures with storebought milk, both with citric acid and starter cultures. But after several attempts, I know how the milk will react and I have acquired the right equipment for it. I'm intimately familiar with the wholly imperfect process that leads to perfect mozzarella from unloved, roughly treated, questionably altered storebought milk. I've learned to work with a monster. My students, however, had inaccurate thermometers and no idea what level of graininess they could expect of their curds while still having a stretchable mozzarella in the end.

Before I even drained the raw milk batch

I had to teach my students the impossible task of figuring out when their curds looked just the right amount of crappy to still be a cheese. I found myself saying this bit a lot: "When it starts to get kind of grainy, don't worry, that's kind of what it should look like; it will smooth out in the stretch." What kind of way is that to teach? What if we had med students learning that if it starts to loose a lot of blood, don't worry, it's probably not going to die yet. It'll work itself out with some sutures. That's not the kind of instruction that elicits a lot of confidence.

So I took my lesson back home and opened my eyes to how incredibly amazing life can be if you have a fresh source of milk. In Texas, raw milk sales are legal if you are licensed for it and sell directly from your farm store. I got my hands on a gallon of raw cow's milk from the closest licensed milk source and began my experiment. For the sake of just seeing what would happen with a different milk, I used the citric acid shortcut.

NO graininess?!

Stretching in hot water! My
storebought
batches fall apart & dissolve
 in hot water or whey,
forcing me to always heat
the curd in the microwave

As soon as the rennet had done its work and I was ready to cut the curd, I realized screwing up a batch of citric acid mozzarella with raw milk was virtually impossible. The curd was so thick and smooth that it wanted to stretch almost immediately. I didn't even have to drain the whey and salvage the grainy curd orphans to come out of there with a luscious, meltable stretch. In fact, there was absolutely no graininess to speak off. It had a unique piquant taste that mellowed out after a few days to creamy, saltiness. The flavor was far from the boring plasticine mouthfeel of storebought milk that I have to mask with olive oil and lots of basil.

I'm on my tippy toes

And the stretch! My god, the stretch! That mozzarella had a stretch that won't quit! I was in love. In love with a forbidden fruit, as raw milk mozzarella will never ever be legal. I can traffic as much of it as I want to my own belly at home. But by its very nature it can never be aged for more than 60 days. I take solace in knowing that I've had amazing mozzarella that's pasteurized. I could even re-create that amazing stretch with pasteurized milk as long as the milk itself was fresh and of superior quality. If you have good milk that is delicately pasteurized, that luscious mozzarella minx with seductive stretch can forever be your muse.