My first (attempted) Mozz- NEED HELP

[iwantthegold]

To all ye glorious mozz makers:

Ok... so i am new to the cheese making world... and this only my second attempt at any cheese so I thought I would swing for the fences.

I am looking for a little help here...

So I followed the recipe on the forum.. save for the rennet taking too long for a clean break and the curd taking a bit too long to come up to temp (20 min or so longer than recipe says), everything went pretty well. Until I got to the spinning stage.

I found somewhere that you can test if you are ready to spin by dropping in a small bit of curd into the 170F water and seeing if it stretched for itself... well it didn't... so I gave it another 20 minutes to heat the curds and then I poured the pot of water into the pot of curds.... 5 minutes of eager mashing and pushing with the two wooden spoons later and... nothing but a big pot of cottage cheese without the nice texture.  I have a feeling this is where many fail and I am not sure that my pH meter is at all accurate.

To back-track... I talked to a chef who also failed at this in the past... and he saw my curd and said that it looked and felt just like the store bought mozz curd that he got in one time. 

So trying not to give up (although I knew it was futile)... I got a new pot and heated the curds back up to even more distasterous results... so now I have about a 1.5 lbs ball of particle cheese curd being held together by nothing more than a tightly wound piece of cheese cloth.

Please offer any and all sageful pieces of advice... it's been a long day and I am going to nap but I appreciate them nonetheless

Ethan

[MrsKK]

The spin test tells you whether the curd is acidic enough to heat and stretch...since it failed at the spin test, you should have given it more time to acidify more.

At this point, I'm not sure if it is redeemable or not.  Sorry!

[iwantthegold]

Well I posted that just after I tried that so really I knew it was dead and gone.. i'm going to give the 30 minute mozz a try to get the texture down (close even if its not exactly the same)

[DeejayDebi]

Sometimes theat grainy mush can be brought back to life after drainig but heating it over and over and over in the micro wave and kneeding it until it becomes cheese. You could also try submerging the bagged curd and kneed ing it in the bag.

[iwantthegold]

Thanks Debi.. I'll give that a shot and see if I can't do just that... now I just need to figure out what I did wrong to get it there... this should be fun haha

[DeejayDebi]

I have tried several times to reccreate this curd shattering phenomnon and it seems to only happen when the curds are over heated early on just before or right after cutting. I have friends that seem to do this often but always swear they were exactly following the recipe when it happened.

[MrsKK]

Overheating can be prevented by using a double-boiler method.  When I used the cheese kettle right on the burner, I frequently had trouble with my cheesemaking.

[iwantthegold]

Well I am using an immersion circulator and a water bath but here is the problem that I run into on all my tries thus far:

Say the desired temp is 105 like in the recipe and I get my waterbath to hold between 104.8 and 105.2 (my typical accuracy for long holds) which should be good, but the outer portions of the curd obviously set earlier and then slow the heat transfer so that even after the 30-45 minutes of bringing it up to 105, the center might still only be 98 degrees (or even lower with the 2 gallon batch of milk).
-So my problem is that the next step is to hold the curd at that 105 degrees for some amount of time but I don't know when to start the timer since not all the curd is set.  Should I wait to start the hold process until I get all the curd to that temperature (which could take 1.5 hours)? or would this release too much whey at this point? 

I also have been trying a store brand milk, but I am going to get the local grassfed and stuff thats only a few days old and see if that makes the difference too.

Ethan

[MrsKK]

Okay, I just looked at the recipe you used.  It does not specify, but while you are warming the curds you should occasionally be stirring them to keep them from matting and to get more even distribution of the heat.

I hope that helps!

[iwantthegold]

Well I am not worried about after the cutting i am worrying about the process after the rennet is added and before the curd is cut

[DeejayDebi]

Do you cover the pot? That should help even out the heat some.

[MrsKK]

Well I am not worried about after the cutting i am worrying about the process after the rennet is added and before the curd is cut

As I read the recipe, the temperature between adding the rennet and until the curd is cut should be at 90 degrees Fahrenheit, so I'm not sure why you were warming it to 105?

[iwantthegold]

Karen,

You make a great point... I think I actually confused myself on this one.  In my second and third fails with mozz (albeit using the famous 30 minute recipe) I know that my pH and milk sources were the issues.   Friday I feel a success coming.

Sorry guys, thanks for the help,

Ethan

[DeejayDebi]

GO GET EM ETHAN!

[vogironface]

Ethan,
Read a thread I started titled "We should just quit with the mozzarella".  The folks here have had a lot of good suggestions on Mozzarella AKA "The cheese spawned in the outer reaches beyond the river styx and consumed by the devils that live there and given to mankind to bring him to his knees in shame and humility lest he begin to think they have actually figured out houw to make cheese."  I call it TCSITORBTRSACBTDTLTAGTMTBHTHKISAHLHBTTTHAFOHTMC cheese for short.  Most folks call it 30 minute Mozzarella because the other is to hard to remember.