It is so Empowering Learning New Skills | Homemade Mozzarella and Kombucha

hello friend welcome back to Ingram homes we are doing a fun project this is something I wanted to do for a really long time and today is the day we are going to make homemade mozzarella cheese and pizza I'm really excited about this so what I'm doing in this big stock pot that I have I'm gonna put two gallons of milk the recipe that I'm following only calls for one gallon but I'm gonna go through the effort of making mozzarella cheese I might as well make a little bit more than just one batch hopefully it turns out if it doesn't turn out I have store-bought mozzarella cheese in my refrigerator so we can have our pizza with mozzarella cheese but I I think this is going to turn out I've done this one or two other times about six years ago so this is a skill that I definitely want to master and today is the day to go ahead and start learning how to do this again and getting proficient at it so what I have done is I just added two gallons of organic milk you can use store-bought milk to make cheese the only thing is when you make cheese you want to make sure that it does not say ultra pasteurized your curd won't set if it's ultra pasteurized so just look on the label and make sure it says pasteurized only you can make cheese out of raw milk too but I don't really have access to that so we're just going to use some organic store-bought milk and this is whole milk and it's pasteurized the best way to find just pasteurized not ultra pasteurized is try to find a milk that is more local to you the longer they have to ship it or the farther they have to ship it typically it's ultra pasteurized I just purchased a mozzarella and ricotta cheese making kit you can buy the ingredients separately to do this but I thought it would be easier just to go ahead and buy a kit I do want to master making ricotta 2 I've made ricotta but it's been five or six years since I've done that as well but today we're just going to make the mozzarella cheese so we need to heat up our milk the recipe says to 90 degrees so I went ahead and I put my milk in here first and while this is warming I'll just stick the lid on it and I should probably take its temperature before so that I know how warm it needs to get to so this kit came with a cheese thermometer so I'm going to get this out of the packaging I'm going to rinse it off real quick and we'll take this milk temperature this milk is sitting at about 58 degrees so it's got not too much to come up to temperature so now what we need to do is we need to dissolve the rennet and the citric acid into some water so I've pre-measured out a half a cup of water and two cups of water in these measuring cups I can link this cheese making kit down below if it's something you are interested in trying to make yourself we need to dissolve the citric acid in two cups of water the citric acid is what makes mozzarella cheese stringy we're just going to get that dissolved in there so that's two cups of water and one tablespoon of citric acid and now we need a half a tablet of rennet so I'm going to cut this tablet in half and we're going to dissolve that in a half a cup of water our citric acid has dissolved in our water and we need to add this right away to our milk before it comes up to temperature fully and we're going to use a stainless steel slotted spoon you want everything when you're making cheese to be as clean as possible we're gonna pour our citric acid mixture into our milk and we're going to stir this vigorously and it says we need to stir this until this comes up to temperature The Remnant that we just dissolved in some water the rennet is what is going to turn the cheese from a milk liquid mixture it's going to turn the cheese into curds and whey that's what kind of binds the curds together and we're gonna get a cheese product because of the rennet so now I want to go ahead and take its temperature to see what we're looking at now this has not been on the stove very long since I put in the milk in this pot and we are already at 80 degrees so it's come up quite a bit so it's not going to take long for this whole pot probably another four or five minutes to come up to our 90 degrees cheese making is something a skill that I really want to master I really want to get into making hard cheeses mozzarella cheese and ricotta cheese are kind of the Gateway cheese I think because they are quite a bit easier and so I want to get really proficient at making both mozzarella and Ricotta and then when I get the confidence under my belt I want to attempt making the harder cheeses like gouda and Parmesan and cheddar and all those really yummy things maybe one day I'll have a milk cow and I will have mastered the skills of turning milk into cheese but now I don't have a milk cow and it won't be for a long time but I can take this time now to learn these skills just like I took before I had a garden I took that time to learn how to can and preserve fresh produce I learned how to Source fresh produce from local farmers and I'm going to take this time before I have a milk cow or dairy cow to Master Cheese making I do already know how to make sour cream and butter so we are at about 85 Degrees I want to check my ingredients or my recipe one more time to make sure it's 90 degrees we're trying to get to yes 90 degrees if you're using raw milk you want it to get to 88 degrees so it's interesting this in the directions it has raw milk directions and pasteurized milk directions we are almost there we're at that temperature so I'm going to turn the heat off I'm going to pull this off the heat [Music] so that did not take long to get to 90 degrees at all that took less than five minutes so now that it's at 90 degrees we took it off the stove and it says take the pot off the burner slowly stir in the rennet in an up and down motion of a slotted spoon for approximately 30 seconds I don't really know what that means to slowly stir in the rennet in an up and down motion with a slotted spoon so we're just gonna go for it rennet is found in the lining of calf stomachs and you can find vegetable based rennet too it's an enzyme I don't know what this is because this just came in the kit that I got so we're gonna stir for 30 seconds this is a 30 quart pot so if this works and I really like it I think I could probably fit four gallons of milk in here at a time if this is something I wanted to do on a regular basis so it says stir for 30 seconds which I think I've done but I tend to like to do things a little bit more than it says so I need to make myself stop because I think I've definitely been doing this long enough you just want to make sure I think think that all the Reddit is mixed in there and I can feel the consistency already changing so I'm going to stop stop stirring and I'm gonna put the lid on and now we just wait for five minutes it says if you're using store-bought milk we're gonna wait for five minutes if you're using raw milk you're gonna wait for ten so I am going to set a timer so so far this is going a lot faster than I would have expected so five minutes timer is started and then once this sits then we get to cut the curds this is going pretty fast and then I need to read the directions on how to stretch it I already put in the refrigerator a pot or a bowl of water really cold water and we're supposed to put that in the refrigerator so it gets even colder so that's what I have going right now while I'm waiting for this I'm going to keep rereading these directions I've probably already read through them three times but I just want to keep familiarizing myself with them so I'm going to keep reading the next step so that when we get to it I kind of have a grasp on what we're doing our timer has gone off so now we get to see if this has set it should look like custard I think I'm going to let it sit for just a minute longer you can see that the Whey which is this yellowy liquid is starting to separate from the curd okay here we go we're gonna cut the curds so we're just gonna take a knife and run it along all the way to the bottom of the pot yeah now we're going to go the other direction [Music] and then we're going to go at an angle at the other direction this recipe just says cut the curds with a knife that reaches the bottom of the pot it doesn't say what size to cut the curds into which is interesting because I know that when I made other or researched other cheese that's been very specific on the sides the curd should be but that's all it says and then it says we need to heat up this milk mixture to 110 degrees so I'm going to turn this stove back on and let's see what temperature we're at right now I don't think this is going to take very long because it didn't take very long to heat it up the first time and it doesn't say let's see put back on the stove and slowly heat it while stirring the curds with a slotted spoon so we still got our slotted spoon here and we're still at about 90 degrees so it's going to take just a couple minutes here probably for it to come up to 110 degrees feels like it's kind of not sticking together like the curds are starting to fall apart but like I said it has been years since I've made this so I don't really remember what it looked like so you can really start to see the way separating from the curds this is super interesting we're at 100 degrees now so the yellow bright yellow liquid in there that's the way and the white that's the curds In My Sink I put a colander with some butter muslin that came with this cheese making kit in it because we're going to have to strain the way from the curds I know you can save the way and do things with it but today we're just focusing on the mozzarella cheese so I'm not going to save the way all right we are at a 110 degrees so I'm going to turn the heat off and then we need to stir this it says for two to five minutes the longer we stir it the firmer the cheese will be and because we're going to put this on Pizza I kind of want it to be a firmer cheese so I'm going to stir this for five minutes so I need to set my timer again for five minutes I'm surprised how fast this process has been going so far foreign [Music] I saved that much weight for the chickens but I couldn't get all of it to fit in that bowl so the rest of it we will just pour down the steak so I just washed my hands really really well because we are going to be touching this curd my chickens devoured the way they absolutely loved it so that was a great use for the way I just put the bowl outside and they polished it off in about three days so here is the mozzarella cheese so far we still need to heat it and stretch it so I'm gonna stick it in we're gonna do it in the microwave there's a couple different ways you can do it you can do it on the stove or in the microwave and I think the microwave is going to be the easiest option so I'm going to try to get as much of this curd off as possible and like I said I wash my hands and made sure they were very very clean since we are touching this cheese and here is our mozzarella cheese before it's salted or stretched okay this is the part that feels intimidating to me but it seems really easy this is just where we're turning it from Just curd into cheese I think so we're going to start with one minute we're going to turn that on and it says in a beautiful romantic world I would rather do this on the stove just because I feel like the microwave seems like the easy way out but it's easy way out I have a microwave I might as well use it so I'm not going to try to die on that sword we're going to try to do it because it's gonna be a lot easier it seems like so it says Ladle the curds into a large microwave safe Bowl drain off the Whey using rubber gloves if you'd like press it into a ball which we already did that when we I squeezed it microwave for one minute fold the curds gently into the center of the bowl draining any excess way off adding your salt optional we're going to add salt one minute and you can see that there's quite a bit of whey that has released out of this so I'm going to strain this now we're going to add our cheese salt and I think the only difference between cheese salt and regular salt is that cheese salt doesn't have iodine in it but I'm going to have to look that up so I'm not exactly sure so we're supposed to add one teaspoon per one recipe and I did two recipes so that's two teaspoons and we're supposed to take a spatula and fold it up onto itself which now we microwave it again Mr grasset is what makes string cheese stretchy and heating it and stretching it is what makes it stringy I think so that's what we're supposed to do you want to microwave it in 30 second increments until it reaches 160 to 170 degrees so let me grab our thermometer I have heard I don't know if this is true but I feel like I've seen this before where you can take your way and heat that up and you can stretch your mozzarella cheese in hot whey water or hot way but I don't know if that's true or not so if any of you guys are expert cheese makers let me know if that's something you can do I'm going to strain off this way while I'm taking its temperature we are at 120 you can see it's already starting to get a little bit stretchier not there yet though foreign bowl of cold water out because we need to stretch this now it is hot I don't have gloves that I want to use on this so I just have to try to do this with my own hands we're at about 150 degrees it says the more you stretch it and fold it the firmer it will be we want it to be smooth and silky I don't have rubber gloves but I have these gloves which will at least be one little layer of protection on my hands just from the Heat but yeah that's easier so now we're supposed to stretch it hot okay starting to cool off a little bit and it's it's not quite the texture I want yet so I'm gonna pop it back in the microwave yes gloves would be a highly suggested item to get if you're going to do this that are you can see how red my hands are that are just for cheese making I have you know rubber gloves but they're for cleaning and there's no way that I would want to get them anywhere near my cheese making project top with great pain comes great reward s it's starting to look really nice and silky and not grainy anymore and I know you can make really cool shapes it says braid it turn it into mini balls large balls but I'm just trying to make some good cheese here if if it's not in a pretty shape that's okay I think I need to microwave this again I did clean out or clean off the outside of my microwave really well before we got started two that's another thing just when you're making cheese from my understanding and you want everything to be as clean as possible now this is not an aged cheese so I don't think it's necessarily as critical that everything is sterilized but you want it really clean but if you are going to be making an aged cheese where you're going to be inoculating it a bacteria or of some kind you want to make sure that you're not introducing any other bacteria or anything into your aged cheese I'm gonna make two [Music] top two nice large balls you can see how nice and shiny this cheese is getting it's so good too it's hot and I'm just kind of Folding It Up on itself I'm just pretending like I know what I'm doing I'm gonna pinch it at the bottom I guess I made a log so we're gonna put that in our cold water okay we're gonna put this in our cold water too we got two logs it said that putting your cheese in the cold water is really important on having the texture you can see how red my hands are having the texture of this cheese come out smooth and not grainy and I think I think that's our cheese now I didn't see until just now it says to make ricotta using the Whey from the mozzarella you can find that recipe on their website which I just realized I could have probably turned so I know traditionally ricotta is a cheese that was invented out of trying to get every last bit of milk protein or milk solids out of cheese was to use the whey but I think I'm going to pop these in the refrigerator because I want them to stay as cold as possible so that we have a really good texture I'm going to pour some of this water out it's a little too full so that we have a nice texture on this cheese and we will weigh it so we can find out how many pounds of cheese we got from two gallons of milk we got the cheese in the fridge and now we're going to get going on the pizza crust I am going to be tripling this recipe this is my pizza dough recipe that I used when I throw pizza dough in the freezer I put all of my cheese making stuff back in this box I washed the thermometer really well and we're gonna get this back in here so that next time I want to make cheese everything is in one spot that was incredibly easy so as long as that cheese turned out that was so easy so I'm excited about that so I'm going to set that aside so I can put that back in the pantry and we can hopefully make more cheese in the future now I was thinking I think I could have used the way to make the pizza crust but I need to do more research on that I thought about that after I gave it to the chickens the chickens have already been enjoying it so I'm glad that they are enjoying that and it's not going to waste so in my big bowl I'm gonna make this pizza dough from scratch because it's super easy or not from scratch I mean well it is from scratch but I'm gonna do it by hand I'm not gonna do with my mixer because my KitchenAid mixer is not big enough to handle this amount of dough and it's super easy to do it by hand so in here we've got our water and now we need to add our sugar just a little bit of sugar to help feed the yeast and then we are going to add our yeast to this mix that up and I'm going to let that sit for just a minute and let the yeast kind of become active now that our yeast is all nice and bubbly I'm going to go ahead and start adding the rest of the ingredients I'm going to do a mixture of white all-purpose flour I just grabbed my big tub because the one down here is almost empty and we are going to need about nine cups of flour I'm gonna do a mixture of just all-purpose white flour and Ein corn flour iron corn flour is an ancient grain it's one of the original wheat varieties and it has a little less gluten structure but the flavor of it is fantastic but because it has a little less gluten structure I like to mix half all-purpose half iron corn because I like the textures of the gluten of all-purpose gives but I like the flavor of the iron corn and this has more protein in it per serving then just your plain all-purpose white flour I can link down below where I get my bulk Goods if you're interested in that and so I'm going to do let's see so we need six nine ten and a half cups so I'm going to put five cups or we'll start with four cups of iron corn flour and five cups of all-purpose flour and you can see let me show you the difference in color it's kind of cool iron corn flour is a lot more rich in pigment this is the einkorn flower and I'm going to put the all-purpose flour in next and you can see that the all-purpose flour is much whiter than the iron corn flour so that's two three four five now we're going to add a good amount of salt so that's one recipe two recipes three recipes worth of salt and that's one two three recipes worth of oil I broke my Danish dough whisk so I'm gonna get in here with just a one of these wooden spatulas and we're going to mix this in as much as we can with this and then I'll get in there with my hands again my hands will be nice and clean in order to get in here and work this dough [Music] okay I think I got that about as mixed as I'm going to with this spatula I'm going to knead this on the counter I'm just going to take a little bit of flour put it on my counter can we we do need to work about one more cup or so of flour into this now this is a triple recipe each recipe makes two pot pies each recipe makes two pizzas so for dinner tonight I'm gonna make two pizzas and then two of the recipes are gonna go in the freezer for another night but we need to work in some more flour and we need to develop this gluten structure on this dough so I'm gonna knead this until the dough becomes super soft and smooth and elasticy so it's going to take me a good five minutes or so so I'm gonna get my arm workout in this morning that's about perfect there so what I'm gonna do because this is a triple recipe I'm gonna cut it in two thirds each one of these is going to be put into a little dough ball the one for dinner tonight I'm going to put a little bit of oil in the bowl that we made the Creston and I'm gonna get this nice and oil just so that this doesn't dry out [Applause] covered and I just got a towel damp and we're going to cover this with a damp towel so that can double in size and then we'll make dinner with that now for these other two dough balls that we have I don't need this to rise at all I'm going to get these directly into the freezer and I'm excited to have pizza dough back in my freezer it's one of my favorite things to have in the freezer because it just makes when you want pizza that much easier when I already have the crust ready to go so I just take a little bit of oil whatever kind you want this happens to be a light olive oil I'm going to stick it in one of these silicone bags I love using these reusable silicone bags for these because they clean up really nicely and I'm not wasting a freezer bag but if you just have a Ziploc bag just just throw it in a Ziploc bag and that works too just fine I'm going to put these directly into my freezer they do not need to rise or anything like that just straight from being made right into the freezer now we need to get the oven preheated I'm going to preheat the oven to 400 degrees and I'm also going to go ahead and preheat my cast irons we're going to make these pizzas in the cast iron I don't always do that I do prefer to do it this way but I don't always take the time to do it but today we are going to do that I'm going to adjust my wraps a little bit before it gets too warm I have two different size cast irons this is your normal 12 inch one and that is a 17 inch one so we're gonna get those preheating while our dough is rising I need to get this cleaned up but while I have my big flour container out I'm going to go ahead and refill this one so that I can have a full container of flour in my cupboard again figured I might as well get that done while my counter is covered in flour and that way [Music] this is kind of a low moment so these are the perfect times when you're cooking to go ahead and clean up and tidy up my goal is to have the kitchen cleaned when I'm all done with all my kitchen shenanigans on this day one of my goals that I wanted to do was make this pizza with home ground flour but I couldn't find my wheat growing dirt anywhere I looked for probably 20 minutes and in the move somehow I just I could not find where I put it well the next day I found it so hopefully I'm going to be grinding my own flower again pretty soon I want to get into that habit again as well with our pizza tonight we're going to have sausage onions and peppers that's Josh's combination for pizza so that's what I'm gonna do I just put down I'm really excited about this a deposit for a whole hog and I'm going to be able to pick that up here in the next couple months I think the end of April actually so maybe not even not even a full month but I am completely out of the sausage from the last Quahog I purchased and I do ideally like to buy as much of my meat from local farmers whenever possible but that's not always possible I ran out of the pork and so this pork is from butcher box I really like butcher Box's quality of their meat I do have a discount for them if you order through my link I think I I love about butcherbox is they do 100 grass-fed grass-finished beef which is something that I'm super super passionate about and if you've never tried grass-fed grass-finished beef it tastes a little different than your typical uh store-bought beef and so if you are interested in buying a whole cow from someone or half a cow but you want to make sure you like the flavor of it first ordering through butcher box is a great way to kind of see if that's something you like I do purchase most my chicken from them because I just can't afford to buy all the chicken pasture raised from local farmers because in my area it's it's just pretty expensive and butcher Box's chicken is organic and so I like the quality of their chicken so I do buy almost all my chicken from them and their pork products is really good too so this is their Italian sausage I am taking it out of the casing because I don't want the casing in our pizza and I'm cooking two packages which is two pounds because I want to put some of it in the freezer so next time I make pizza I don't have to cook sausage I like to have pre-cooked sausage and bacon in my freezer so when I want to go to cook with sausage or bacon I don't always have to cook it and I can just save myself a step there so that's what I'm doing here is pre-cooking two pounds and I'll probably only need one pound for dinner tonight if you want to buy from local farmers the best way I have found to find meat producers in my area is either look on craigslist Facebook Marketplace and a non-profit website called localharvis.org that website is also a great place to find csas if you want to become a member of a farm before I had my own garden and I lived in the suburbs I became a member of a farm basically you pay in usually the winter if you're if you're going to become a member of a vegetable farm for the spring and summer usually you put a deposit down in the winter so that that gives the farmer some cash flow to purchase their seed and fertilizer and then throughout the summer you get a box of produce so localharvest.com is a really cool resource for that I'm getting back in the habit of making kombucha and we made this kombucha about well on Wednesday it will be two weeks ago and today is Monday and I want to give this a taste test I tested this about four days ago and it was not quite fermented enough it was still a little bit on the sweet side so let's give it a taste test now and see how the flavors look if you've never made kombucha before it can look a little bit like a science experiment this is a brand new scoby that this kombucha has formed it's very healthy looking the original scoby is right down there so this is a brand new scoby so I'm just going to take a little bit of the kombucha kombucha is fermented tea I'm going to give this a taste test and see if I like the flavor of it oh yeah that is perfect so good homemade kombucha to me tastes way better than anything store-bought so I need to get some more kombucha made up so I'm going to start some let me make sure I have enough tea bags I know I was running low on black tea I don't know if I have enough to make a whole new batch right now should I want to get this covered in the meantime so we're going to just cover this back up and I'm going to see if I can go find some tea bags I need eight to ten tea bags to make one gallon of kombucha let's see oh choose three [Music] yeah these are all fancy herbal teas and I need black tea green tea oh we're here two two three four six eight eight tea bags is technically how many you need I like it a little bit stronger so I like 10 I happen to have enough so I can make up one more gallon woohoo I make a tea concentrate when I make kombucha so I just have some water in here I'm gonna make some flax sweet tea and we're just gonna get that in the microwave until it's nice and hot and then we'll add our tea bags kombucha is so much more affordable to make from home than to purchase it I used to make two gallons every two weeks and Josh and I that was like the perfect amount for us but then I got out of the Habit we stopped drinking it and so it wasn't worth me making it and then for some reason I got back in the habit of drinking it and I wasn't drinking that much so I just was purchasing you know a little bit here and there and then it started adding up really quickly so then I thought you know what I want to start making kombucha again because it's so much more affordable it to me tastes way better and so I went to go make kombucha again and I had killed my scoby I had never had that happen before I was keeping my kombucha in my pantry which is the coldest room in the house it's actually colder than my basement and kombucha does not like to be cold it likes to be warm so I learned that the hard way so I went ahead and I purchased a new scoby none of my friends right now are making kombucha if you know people that make kombucha they are more than willing to give you a scoby but nobody I know right now is making it so I did have to go ahead and purchase one since I made the first batch of Kombucha I'm just bottling that up you can see how it's a little bit fizzy but I want to do a second ferment on this and I want to flavor this kombucha so these are my favorite bottles to make my kombucha in because they have a wide mouth and they're really easy to clean a lot of people really like the flip top ones and those aren't my favorite because they're hard to clean so we are going to flavor this kombucha strawberry this is the best kombucha I have made probably ever these strawberries were grown on our property I picked them last summer and they are fabulous so I want this kombucha to get really carbonated so I put the fruit in there which is going to give the kombucha a little bit of sugar to eat and I put the lid on tight and I'm gonna let that sit on the counter for a second ferment and the carbonation is going to get trapped in the bottle and it's going to get nice and bubbly and fizzy and delicious I do have a video that's a more step-by-step video on how to make kombucha I can link that down below if you're interested in that and I can also link down below where I got my scoby this is probably the best kombucha culture I've ever had and I'm really really happy with this scoby in particular it tastes it's creating a really yummy flavored kombucha I'm so excited back again but now it's time to give this cheese a taste test and to slice it up so we can make our pizza because our dough has doubled in size it looks beautiful we made cheese wow does it string it doesn't really string I don't know if I I didn't um well let's see oh yeah it's kind of peeling a little bit I wanted to make it a little bit more on the firm side because I knew we were going to be putting it on pizza and so I didn't want it to be too runny so we're going to shred this up friends [Music] it's shredding up like cheese we made cheese it was that easy oh my goodness we're making cheese we're shredding cheese we're we're shredding cheese that we made this is incredible oh I forgot to weigh it shoot darn it oh well I think I will wait next time I make it okay I think one block is probably going to be more than enough for our pizza oh my goodness that is incredible that was so easy the crazy thing is it tastes like cheese whenever we're starting to learn new skills it can always feel super intimidating and it takes a lot of bandwidth and brain power to learn this skill like when I was first starting to learn to make kombucha it was overwhelming it was seemed so complicated and so confusing and when it comes down to it once you get comfortable with it it just becomes second nature and let me encourage you friends if you want to learn to make kombucha it is really easy and you'll just get super comfortable and you'll realize that it's not that hard but anytime we learn new skills it can be very very intimidating and that's how I feel about cheese making and so I would love cheese making to become just as second nature where you don't even have to where I don't even have to think about it like making kombucha because when I first started making kombucha it was really intimidating and it took a lot of brain power and I always thought that I was messing it up because fermentation is so for it was so foreign to me and cheese making feels really foreign to me and you know I just wanted to become comfortable with the concept and the skill so it just felt really good to get this win under my belt and make cheese the more I make it the more comfortable I'll feel making it and hopefully we can move on to some more complicated cheeses I'm really comfortable making sour cream homemade sour cream and homemade butter but we're just taking the step in the right direction to learn how to make cheese and hopefully it will become second nature that is so exciting now I just need to master sourdough my oldest sister is really good at sourdough she's been doing sourdough for years my other sister is just going down the sourdough rabbit hole and I keep getting pictures of her sourdough Creations that are beautiful and so now I just need to finally conquer sourdough if I can conquer cheese I think I can conquer sourdough the only problem I guess kombucha is a living thing and I have to keep this alive but I just felt like I haven't had the bandwidth to keep one more thing alive and I've always struggled with keeping my sourdough starter alive so I have not done that so this is still steeping I'm gonna clean up the kitchen dinner is going to be so good I didn't get any Peppers out of the freezer I could have got Peppers out of the freezer but I didn't feel like doing that so I'm gonna go ahead and get this kitchen cleaned we're making some serious progress today so to finish our kombucha we're gonna take our tea concentrate that's been steeping for a good 15 minutes and I do get out any of the tea that's in the bags so I just squeeze that out and then I'm going to compost these tea bags and to this because it's still nice and warm I'm gonna add one cup of sugar foreign [Music] now I can sit here and let this come down to room temperature if I wanted but I don't have that kind of time today I just want to get this going so in this other jar I just have some cold water and now this is a nice temperature you don't want to put hot water it has to be under 105 degrees ish before you add it to your scoby and your starter culture because you can kill the living stuff that's in here if you put two pot of water in here so now I'm just going to fill this up with more water I'm on a well so I don't have chlorine or fluoride in my water if you are on City Water I would recommend you purchase water that does not have chlorine in it because you don't want to kill this culture now we're going to put our towel back on put a rubber band on and we're going to stick this back on our counter for about two weeks to ferment and we will have another gallon of Kombucha going it's an easy ratio it's one cup of sugar one gallon of water one cup of starter culture and eight to ten black tea bags to make one gallon of Kombucha I like the 10 tea bags because I like it a little bit stronger flavor and you got yourself some homemade kombucha now I like a very very fizzy kombucha so I'm gonna let this sit on the counter and do its second ferment for at least two if not three days the sugar that's in the strawberries is going to help feed this culture and help make it even fizzier you can see that there is some fuzz at the fuzz we don't want fuzz fuzz is mold there's some Fizz at the top and we want this to continue to build pressure and so when we open it we have a nice carbonated so those are the freeze-dried strawberries kitchens clean we are just waiting for the pizza to come out of the oven all right I think these pizzas are done we've got the kitchen cleaned which is fantastic we have a lot more projects done today than I was anticipating look look at that I'm excited to try this it looks like the cheese melted pretty well I'm gonna have to do some research on that oh yeah this one looks really nice not too bad though for my first attempt in like six years and when I made it last time six years ago I didn't like it so I didn't eat it so we have already done better this time than last time so let's cut into these pizzas [Music] [Music] okay so I think I let this cool just long enough yeah that's a pretty big accomplishment homemade crust I guess I didn't make the sausage but homemade cheese turned out pretty good I'm excited I think that I want to keep going down this road and keep practicing the mozzarella and perfecting it this is great if you guys are interested in any of these recipes or the getting yourself a kombucha scoby or trying to make mozzarella cheese the first time I can link the kit that I use down below if you're interested in that I just want to say thank you so much for taking time out of your day to spend time with me as we did some fun experiments in the kitchen and they turned out pretty well they don't always turn out well around here but this one was a success so I'm excited about that I'm going to call Josh in we're going to have a wonderful dinner and we have enough for tonight and some for some lunches throughout the week so thanks for being here thanks for being new and I can't wait to see you next time bye friend

Channel: Acre Homestead

Views: 219,716

Keywords: Acre Homestead, homemade cheese, homemade mozzarella, making cheese, homemade kombucha, brewing kombucha, cooking from scratch, learning new skills, bulk food, batch cooking, homemade food

Id: vIWOCikOpZM

Length: 48min 36sec (2916 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023