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
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!
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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!
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
Do you cover the pot? That should help even out the heat some.
Quote from: iwantthegold on March 02, 2010, 03:27:10 AM
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?
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
GO GET EM ETHAN!
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.
Hang in there, Ethan. You can do it!
I never had a batch anyone made yet I couldn't bring back by nuking it and kneading it a million times. One of my girlfriends had a batch shatter this week that was going to be a cheddar and we turned the grainy mush into orange mozzarella by nuking it. Strange looking stuff but the kid loved it.
I think I will have to change my name to Dr Cheese. I am always running out to make house calls on cheese makes gone bad! This is almost as bad as when I used to build computers and sell them. ;D
Karen and Debi:
I DID IT!
well I think my pH was never right.. first because I didn't let the cultures long enough and second because I couldn't find citric acid and used ascorbic... luckily I managed to make it today!! It may be a bit bland and I didn't salt it because I did that too early last time and just turned the whole curd into a sloppy pile O'mush no matter how much we heated it. I definitely think the milk I was using was off so I should have most things down for this to repeat.
I am going to give the recipe from fiasco farms (http://fiascofarm.com/dairy/mozzarella.htm (http://fiascofarm.com/dairy/mozzarella.htm)) minus the raw milk part for now a try tomorrow. Anyone had any experience with this one in particular?
one down.. a million to go
Ethan
Good job Ethan!
Ascorbic acid is not the same thing as citric acid. That has come up a few times here and it never gets mentioned as one of the ingredients used before the failure until after many heart breaks. Maybe John can't post a flashing sign somewhere?
Ascorbic acid is not the same thing as citric acid! Don't use it for mozzarella!
maybe this will work?
It's interesting that the FiasCo recipe uses both culture and citric acid. I wonder why?
You may also want to check out Fankhauser's recipes: http://biology.clc.uc.edu/Fankhauser/Cheese/Cheese.html (http://biology.clc.uc.edu/Fankhauser/Cheese/Cheese.html) My method is most like his Italian Mozzarella recipe and I really like it. However, I do use raw milk, so my results can be quite different from past/homogenized milk.
I would say that the ascorbic acid was the issue all along. For more flavor and to salt your mozz, try using a gallon of whey (or however much you have) to heat the curd up. I add a cup of kosher salt to a gallon of whey and it salts the curd just right. If you use canning salt or cheese salt, though, the amounts would probably be quite different.
Let us know how the next batch goes for you.
Well I adjusted the recipe ever so slightly, added a little longer cook time (extra 30 min) for the curds and a slightly higher temp (93-94 instead of 90-91) and they never really expelled the whey like i saw before... I hung it as in the fiasco farms recipe and... well its a big glob of nothing sort of reminiscent to a dense ricotta...
I should note that i changed the recipe because it called for raw milk and mine was most definitely not... back to the drawing board i suppose
Debi: I think that sign is perfect
Karen: I found when I added a cup of kosher salt for one of my failed mozz attempts I found a white residue on top and on the cheese... I know it is just undissolved salt but do you boil your solution and then cool? The reason I ask is I believe that ratio approaches the saturation point of the solution and that's usually necessary for production in chemistry.
The extra culturing definitely gave the fresh curd a better flavor, without the cultures (and salt remember) the cheese was exceptionally bland but the cultured+ citric acid recipe had a nice full body.
All I know is my 30 minute mozz turned out well and melted well on my first pizza that night and even better after sitting in my fridge the following night... and the fresh parm I added made up for the lack of salt (I do love my parm haha) but I guess this just proves I need to get some raw milk....luckily I'm in the ag program at my school
No, I don't boil the whey, but I do heat it to about 160 degrees for heating and stretching the cheese, so it is plenty hot enough to dissolve all of the salt.
Sorry, I don't have any answers for your latest attempt! I do have to give you credit for continuing, though.
Raw milk is great but you can make cheese with store bought as long as it is not UHT or ESL quite nicely by adding Calcium cloride.