Bread and Cheese

This weekend was cheese making weekend, with a bonus of bread which used some leftover whey!

Italian Feather Bread:

Feta made with goat cheese, which tasted great with the bread!

Mozzarella - oh this batch of mozzarella came out so much better than my first try!  It's so buttery tasting and the texture is much softer than my last, overcooked batch.  Was wonderful eaten with the bread, but hope to have some left for pizza.  Well, I guess I can always make more :-)

Making Mozzarella

We like to make home made pizza, so why not make our own cheese?   To learn how, I signed up for the cheese making class on Craftsy, purchased some local and not so local supplies and books.  The class teaches how to make Chevre, mozzarella and cheddar, but goat milk is more difficult to find than cow's milk, so I decided to begin with mozzarella.

First you start with fresh, whole, pasteurized, but not homogenized milk (not ultra-pasteurized, they say it won't form curds).  After adding acid, rennet, and a little heat, it will look like a new container of yogurt (sorry I didn't have a chance to take a picture of that step), and then you can cut it into curds.

You really have to watch the temperature, and even using a water bath, more than once it got warmer than it should have, and my gloves hadn't arrived yet, so I tried kneading it in the bowl using thin ones, with some stretching.  I'm surprised I was able to stretch it at all, since it was a bit firmer than it should have been, because of the higher temperature.  Due to distractions, it spent a little longer in the finishing brine than it should have, so it was a bit salty on the outside, but edible, and not bad for my first try!