Sour mozzarella

[Stinkycheeseman20]

After many failed efforts to make traditional, long mozzarella stretch, I finally got it to stretch. But this time , the final product was too sour to eat. Does anyone have any idea why this would be?

Here is what I did:

I used 3 gallons of raw milk, TA 61 and MA 11 frozen cultures. I used 3/4 of a tablet of vegetable rennet.

after bringing the milk to 99 degrees, I added the bacteria and let it ripen for 30 minutes. Then I added the rennet. I saw floculation in about 10 minutes. Then I just let it sit, without cutting, for a while. I checked the pH occasionally. After about 2.5 hours or so, I cut the curd a little bit, not a lot. The pH was still about 5.5. About 15 minutes later, it plummeted to 5.1. I quickly drained the curd and began stretching. After stretching, I put each ball into slightly cool whey for a bit, then into a brine.

It was immediately too sour. I hoped it would mellow out after a little while, but after sitting in the brine it is still too sour.

Can anyone help? Thank you!!

[tecla]

You waited too long to cut your curds after adding rennet. NECM's recipe suggests 45 minutes, which is about a 4-4.5x flocculation multiplier; in your case, that's 40-45 minutes after adding the rennet. 2.5 hours is a long time, and put your curds pretty far along in getting acidified.

It'll take about 20 minutes to cut and stir the curds, and another hour-ish of intermittent stirring to shrink the curds, and then drain and keep them warm while testing them for stretchability. With a one-hour ripening before adding rennet, you're looking at 3 ish hours from adding culture to draining curds. That's about 2 hours after adding rennet.

Another thing is that when using raw milk, it often has plenty of endemic LAB cultures already, so you probably want to reduce the MA11 and TA61 amounts by even half; I have to do this with the raw milk from the farms around here or my curds acidify too fast.

The ideal pH of curds at draining is generally going to be somewhere in the 5.9-6.2 range, depending on the cheese style. At 5.5, your curds were rocketing downward, very difficult to control or to halt the pH drop at that point.

Have a look at Jim's recipe at NECM, it'll give you a decent idea of modifications to make that'll help you dial this in.

https://cheesemaking.com/products/mozzarella-cheese-making-recipe-cultured