mozzarella!

tonight, we made cheese.

as you may recall, we took a cheese making class a month or so ago. for marta's birthday i got her the supplies, and tonight we made fresh whole milk mozzarella. since it was our first go at it, we decided to make only a quart of milk's worth.

here is the milk just after we added he rennet. the rennet is a complex of enzymes in the stomach of mammals that digests mother's milk. when you add a concentrated amount of it to milk (milk that hasn't been ultra-pasteurized) it causes the curds and whey to separate.
the white part in the middle is the curd which we made into cheese, and the yellowish liquid is the whey.

after warming and stretching, we made molded the curds into balls of mozzarella. it turns out that one quart of milk only makes about 6 ping-pong balls of mozzarella, but man-o-man does it taste like homemade-italian-milky-cheesy-mozzarella-goodness. below is a little appetizer we made of cherry tomatoes and basil, from our garden, with our first homemade mozzarella.

next time, we will stock up on a whole lot more milk from blue marble, so we can make enough fresh mozzarella to share.