These Curds Can't Even Handle Me Right Now: March Madness Edition

Rock Chalk Jayhawlk!

Just your average school pride cheese.

That's right, my friends. What you have right there is homemade blue cheese on a pizza. Obviously not your traditional blue cheese. Indeed, it is instead a ball of mozzarella dyed blue.



Riding on a wave of confidence inspired by my previous batch of shockingly successful mozzarella, I went out on a crazy limb of cheese-inspired school spirit for the last few rounds of the tournament. With the last batch of mozzarella, we made a standard March Madness pizza for rounds two and three of the tournament (previously rounds one and two). It was a similar, but improved, pizza as what we had made for the Super Bowl. Now that the the field had been whittled down and my team was still standing, I really had to step up my game on the cheese and pizza front. Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight cuisine never saw this coming through the lane.

I was working with time constraints this time. So, I opted for the quick and easy citric acid recipe. Plus, I had no idea what adding food coloring to the milk would do. I didn't want to waste cultures on a debacle born of whimsy. Turns out, milk absorbs a lot of dye. I was looking for as deep of a blue for KU's Crimson & Blue colors as I could get, and god forbid I end up with Carolina powder blue. So, I emptied a whole bottle of blue food coloring into my gallon of milk. Then I followed the steps as usual. Heat milk to 90, add dissolved citric acid, ripen for five minutes, add rennet, set for five minutes, stir for a few minutes while milk reaches 110 degrees, drain, squeeze out whey, salt and stretch immediately.

Crimson and Blue. These colors don't run.
No really, I thought the blue dye
would bleed all over the pizza, but it didn't.

Final result: Crimson and Blue pizza idea runs away with the score. The stretch was just a bit grainier than my previous citric acid mozzarella. But after cooling, and slicing, the texture was fine, and it tasted like the usual quick and easy mozzarella. Somewhat boring and bland, but acceptably delicious when melted on pizza. I went to work with red bell peppers, building a masterpiece.

Granted, if we weren't limited by my foolhardy desire to turn my pizza pie into a cookie cake and decorate it with the letters K-U, we would have had a more even distribution of toppings. If so, this would have been one of our best pizzas to date.

I love March Madness and college basketball generally. March is as close to the excitement I get at Christmas. And this is my Christmas gift to my alma mater. In spirit, of course. If we lose, I'll simply cry into my leftovers, and cheer on my remaining favorites, perhaps with more dyed cheese. I love March.

(A special thanks to Joe B and Matt M for helping inspire this idea from afar.)




Oh my, is that homemade yogurt dyed blue, and flavored with crimson cherry preserves? Seriously, I love March.