Fresh Mozzarella Cheesemaking Tutorial | Raw Goats Milk & An Experiment With Store Bought Milk

hey friends welcome back to roots and refuge farm I'm Jess and today I am actually responding to your requests and making a video showing you how to make fresh mozzarella I did a vlog a few weeks ago and in that I made fresh mozzarella for our fourth of July cookout and several of you commented saying that you would love to see a step-by-step guide on how to make that recipe so today that's what we're going to do sometimes I nearly talk myself out of doing videos in my kitchen whenever it has a sink full of dishes but then I realized if I wait for that thing to be empty I may never record anything in this kitchen because we live here as you can see I've got a billion things going on I've got video uploading here I've got my seeds all laid out here on the table some of them some of the falsies getting ready to start planning our fall garden I won't go in for another month and a half or so but I am a girl that likes a plan so let's get to this recipe I have always been told that when making homemade cheeses especially one like mozzarella that you need to use raw milk so we have goats that's not really an issue for us in the past I have bought raw milk from local farms but now we have as much raw milk as we want as long as our girls right now however being of the curious nature I wondered if you could make mozzarella out of store-bought milk that's pasteurized now here in Arkansas I know that I've not been able to find anything that is not like ultra pasteurized at any sort of store I've never found non homogenized milk at any sort of you know regular store so I went to searching online and I found a couple of comments on different forums where people said I use store-bought milk that is homogenized and pasteurized and I make mozzarella jizz fun so I figured I would take a four dollar risk and I bought just the cheapest milk that you can get at the store that's just regular vitamin D whole milk and after I take you through the step by step on the raw milk I'm gonna give it a shot and see if I can go through the same steps with this store-bought milk and just see what happens because I thought you know if that is an option it might be helpful for you guys to know before you try so we'll do that after we make our goat's milk mozzarella all right you're gonna need a few things right off the bat in order to make mozzarella at home you need rennet this is animal rennet you can also get vegetable rennet it comes in either a liquid form or a tablet form this is obviously the liquid and I get that and the next thing you need citric acid at a local store here called fermentable in North Little Rock Arkansas however they are both widely available online I will find some sources and throw some links down below in the information if you need to know where to get that you also need a gallon of milk I've got two jars of our raw goat's milk here what I have found on the milk is that the fresher the better I tried to make mozzarella once out of some raw cow's milk from a local farm that was just a little bit older and the curds didn't set up right so since then I've just made it a practice that if I'm making milk I use the freshest note we have so this was milked last night and then you need a thermometer I'm sort of food thermometer I've got this one here that has the long string I think this is like $6 at IKEA but you could just use any you could use a candy thermometer it just needs to be one that measures underneath a hundred degrees a lot of times thermometers start at a hundred Greece whenever it comes to food so make sure it measures underneath that and you need a heavy-bottomed nonreactive pot so I use the stainless steel pot it's got that thick bottom make sure that you do not put this in an aluminum pot because that is reactive also cast iron is reactive now I have a lot of enameled cast iron I cook almost exclusively in cast iron however the reason I don't try to use that enameled cast iron for this is because you really need to be able to fluctuate the temperature so much cast iron holds so much heat I just have had more success doing this in a stainless steel pot I've read a tip years ago when I first started in any sort of efforts of making cheese that whenever you make cheese you should ice your pot which is essentially to put a piece of ice on the bottom of your pot before you even turn the heat on and move the pot around for the ice to melt and essentially let the ice coat the bottom of your pot with a just a thin layer cool water an idea is after you do this that you pour a milk in and then while you're stirring you never touch the bottom of the pot and that this is supposedly supposed to help keep the milk from scalding on the bottom the pot I have no idea if there is any merit whatsoever to this but I've always done because by nature I am like a total rule follower and so if someone says hey you should totally do this I'm like okay I feel very compelled to and I've always done this I've never once had milk scald on the bottom of my pot ever I've always done this and I'm too scared not to because I'm like what if it's called so I don't know if there's any merit to that I just wanted to tell you guys because I do i smoke pot every single time I make cheese all right oh my god too tight okay we're going to start out by putting our milk and our 1 gallon of milk this is raw goat's milk from Argos then we're gonna take one and a half teaspoons of citric acid and the original recipe that I learned how to make mozzarella from said that you dissolve the citric acid in water first and I missed that step and have just always sprinkled it on top of my milk so that's what I do you just sprinkle one and a half teaspoons of citric acid across your milk we're gonna start it in and now we're gonna put the pot on to medium low heat up to now the heat has not even been on okay so stir that that citric acid you know pretty well it's just it's mixed in just starting real gently and now what we're gonna do is we're gonna heat this milk to 90 degrees while this is first starting to heat up I go ahead and get ready to take my milk off the stove this takes like between like 5m6 minutes ticking it up to 90 degrees and so I'm just getting a place ready to put this pot when I take it off the stove that's when I have and set my thermometer for 90 degrees my milk is currently 56 I'll just stir this occasionally while checking the temperature our milk our milk is getting pretty close about 75 degrees so I'm gonna go ahead and put a quarter teaspoon of rennet into one cup of water so I've mixed my run it in with this water and I'm just gonna leave it right here waiting for that meal to get ready if you are using tablet run it you're going to use a quarter of a tablet and then of course the liquid rennet is a quarter of a teaspoon [Applause] sir just to make sure it really is 90 degrees all throughout and it is so I'm taking this off the heat my pan of milk is now off the heat I've got my rennet and water ready so I'm going to pour that over and now I want to mix that in using like a gentle up-and-down scooping motion I'm not trying to stir the milk and a hard circle I'm just very gently mixing it up and down for 30 seconds using the spoon I'm going to kind of stop the motion of a milk I want it to be still and I'm gonna get a lid I like to use a clear lid and that's what's with this pot but that way I can see it just cover it with something if you want to okay so I'm gonna put this on here I'm gonna set a timer for five minutes now it's important to leave it alone it needs to be completely still for five minutes you know touch the pot don't peek at it if you don't have a clear lid leave it alone because what's happening now is the way and the curds are going to separate now we wait the timer is up so let's take a look in this pot you can see here I am cutting this and you can see there that it is it's got some solidity to it and I'm cutting all the way down to the bottom just like this then I'm going to turn the pot now you can see the lines that I just cut I turned the pot and now I'm going to cut the lines so that they are crossing and this is this is called cutting the curds and what I'm doing is I'm just separating up all of that curds right now this stage that we're at this is curds and whey yes it is very tempting for me to make a little miss muffet joke right now but I will refrain from that kind of cheesiness now you see my curds are cut if you get to the point of you know taking your lid off after five minutes when the rennet I'm doing its thing and your mixture hasn't set yet it hasn't started to separate put the lid back on and give it a few more minutes those things kind of can fluctuate depending on like the temperature in your kitchen and all these different things so it's not necessarily ruined if it hasn't set up at five minutes sometimes I'll put the lid back on I can do the exact same thing sometimes it's set most of the time it set a few times I've checked it hasn't been I'm just giving it like two or three more minutes it's been fun okay so now I'm going to put my pan back on the burner on medium heat and I'm gonna just very gently begin stirring this until the the mixture in the way reaches a hundred and five degrees very gently stirring this go ahead and put my thermometer in there so I'm get an idea where we're at mixture is now at about ninety five degrees they will not take it very long to get qualify so I'm gonna go ahead and get a strainer ready over a bowl I've got a bowl that is microwave safe and a little strainer I had a better one than this there recently got broken so it's gonna have to do I'm just going to set it up right here continue to just give these a little stir here and there the curds are really kind of starting to break down and melt a little bit we're getting really close to temperature we're at a hundred and five degrees back off the heat and using a slotted spoon I'm going to scoop these curds out of the way and into this fine mesh colander all right at this point I feel like I've gotten everything out of that way that I'm going to so what I'm going to do now is take this colander and I'm just gonna turn it and press on it to strain as much of the way out of this cheese as I can I'm going to dump all this way back into our pan way is really good stuff it's good to use and other recipes like in place buttermilk you can you can put in smoothies you can use it in all kinds of cooking or if you don't want to do that you can go pour it out in your garden and if not that give it to your animals your your pigs your chickens your dogs just whatever don't throw it away that's a byproduct of making cheese but there are lots of ways to use that without wasting another thing is if you're going to save this in the refrigerator you're gonna need a little bit of that so we'll get to that later okay so I've put my curds in this microwave safe Bowl and I'm going to stick this in the microwave for one minute just on regular time it just came out of the microwave after 1 minute and if you'll notice around the edges it's really starting to melt the middle still looks a lot like it did when we put it in seong little break in here I was actually just editing this footage the day after I shot it and realized that a clip got deleted right here in a pretty critical point don't want you to make sure the instructions here are clear when you first get your cheese out of the microwave after the first time you might grab it for one minute you're gonna squeeze squeeze it out squeeze all the way out all the liquid out drain that liquid off put it back in your bowl and then you're gonna microwave it in thirty-second increments after every 30 seconds you repeat the process of squeezing that cheese and extracting it's much whey as you possibly can all right let's get back to the footage after our third round in the microwave we're starting to get something looks a lot more like cheese this is getting fairly warm to touch it still got a little bit of liquid in it no you can do the stretch test see it's still breaking you want to be able to stretch it at least like 12 inches or so before it breaks this is hot I wouldn't want to hold it still am able to handle it if if you have a hard time touching hot stuff and that's bothering you you can get some gloves to do this part I do really suggest doing it with your hands as much as possible it just gives you a better feel of what you're dealing with plus what happens when it starts getting really stretchy and you're using a colander is parts start getting stuck down in there and you lose some of your cheese so begin folding this in over itself squeezing out that liquid I'm gonna put it back in the microwave for another 30 seconds so when you get your cheese out of the microwave and it looks like this you know you have reached doneness basically you've got nice long stretch it's very smooth it's very shiny just folding it in on itself and you might start off to squeeze a little bit of way out but at this point this is done mozzarella now we're gonna salt it I use kosher salt yeah I want to say that like something around a teaspoon I don't ever measure it I just I just salt it's his face it's it's good to go ahead and put it a little on there and taste it and make just saw fit to taste instead of trying to measure a certain amount because it might be too much for you and then you can't go back and then you just work that salt in by kneading this cheese in and on it so okay so that's it our cheese is done and I am actually going to go ahead and use this I'm about to make countrified chicken parmesan tonight with some fried chicken and some marinara sauce that I made out of our Tomatoes so this is going to be melted on top of that is delicious warm just as soon as it's done it's one of my favorite ways to eat it just to eat it fresh you cannot tell that this is goat's milk at all and I've made this many times for many people and no one's ever been like oh that tastes like a goat just tends to be kind of hard fast it takes on the consistency of like a shredding cheese like a shredding mozzarella if you're going to store it in your refrigerator what I'll do is put it in a little container and pour way on top of it from the pot that we have left over from making this mozzarella and then cover it and put it in the fridge it lasts for a few days in the fridge and what I like to do whenever I go to eat that after it's been in that way because I like to heat it back up because I really enjoy it warm it's really nice warm but I have heard of people like separating it out into little balls and putting it in the way so they can eat on their salad that way so it's just whatever whatever you prefer it's definitely easy very simple steps when the easiest cheese's you can make and if you do have a home dairy and a lot of excess milk this is a great way to get rid of it now let's give the cow's milk a try and see if that works I am gonna go ahead and give it a shot with a store-bought cow's milk going about it in the exact same process as I did on the other I don't know if this is gonna work but I figured I would take this little gamble that way if you don't have access to raw milk you can give it a try or no not to give it a try just my first observation on cow's milk mozzarella is that it is curdling much faster with the citric acid just brought it up to the 80 degree tip and it's already it's already got some good curds going I'm at the point of gently stirring my rennet into this cow's milk and it's already thickened up quite a lot more than the goat's milk usually does by this point kind of interesting my observation at this point I've just cut the curds is that they're not really quite as solid as the goat's milk was but they're definitely have formed curd so I'm reheating them and as you can see we've got some definite kurtz I would almost guess that this I feel like there's more curds and less way than the goat's milk all right observation after separating the curds out in the cow's milk there are way more curds in cow's milk look at that it's almost twice as much after I've separated it out so significantly less way and a lot more curds now I'm going to stick them in the microwave and we'll see how they do during this step of the process all right just got it out of the microwave on the first 1 minute run and I'm starting to have some doubts as to whether or not this is gonna work I'm gonna put it back in but what I'm noticing right now is that the curds are having very little stretch to them usually at this point there is a good bit of stretch I just squeezed a lot of the way out so we'll give it another try 30 seconds and hopefully we'll start to see some stretch this mozzarella okay guys cow's milk mozzarella is coming together there is some stretch happening it's not smooth yet you see it's starting to get that Shawn and stretch is getting pretty good little stretch there before it breaks more I work this right now the shinier and stretchier it's getting this definitely makes more volume than the goat's milk does I'm gonna go one more 30 second round in the microwave with this so I think with the cow's milk mozzarella with the store-bought mill this is this is something that I read that it would break a little more that it was it was hard to get it like really stretchy because of the way the molecules in this milk have reacted to being pasteurized so I think this is probably about as good as it's gonna get as far as stretch goes it's nice and shiny it's really smooth I'm gonna go ahead and salt it and give it a taste my conclusion on this is that it's not ideal I think that this breaking has to do with the fact that it was pasteurize milk so it's not like this super elastic smooth thing that that raw milk would have produced but it is it is good the flavors really good it's a little bit different texture than the goat's won't mozzarella which is very very soft this is a little more firm I'm gonna take a little bit of this and microwave it for a little while just to see what happens to see if it melts nicely like a normal monster would all right so a little test I took a small amount of the cow's milk mozzarella and I stuck it in the microwave for just about 30 seconds just to see what would happen and what we have friends is wonderfully melty stretchy shiny mozzarella so mmm my assessment is that the cow's milk mozzarella is a total success this is awesome I'm going to go ahead and microwave the rest of this and see if I can stretch it out more I was kind of nervous to put the whole block or the whole ball in there yeah that's good cheese tonight mozzarella cheese now that we're completely done with the goat's milk and the cow's milk mozzarella is you can see the difference here the cow's milk is on the left the goat's milk is on the right now I've got a little bit of a color difference that's pretty typical of of milk products from cows versus goats and I would say the flavor is very similar on both the bees alright friends that was super fun thank you so much for hanging out in my kitchen with me and making mozzarella doing experiments I hope this helps you guys let me know in the comments if you have success with this method of making mozzarella and what you think about it god bless you thank you for watching until next time [Music]

Channel: Roots and Refuge Farm

Views: 97,348

Keywords: cheese making, how to make fresh mozzarella, cooking from scratch, how to make cheese, how to make mozzarella, using goats milk, goats milk recipe, home dairy, homesteading, homesteading vlog, small farm, roots and refuge, cooking video, cooking tutorial, cheesemaking, cheese tutorial, farm kitchen, growing food, making your own food, back to basics, back to the land

Id: qMm8CJuDUQw

Length: 22min 30sec (1350 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 18 2018