The BEST Homemade Mozzarella Cheese Ever! Plus a Homemade Pizza.

[Music] hey everybody welcome back to the homestead well tonight is going to be pizza night here on the homestead but before we can even think about making pizzas we need to make some fresh mozzarella cheese now that we have our own Jersey milk cow here on the homestead we're getting more milk than we know what to do with and making mozzarella cheese is a great way to use some of it up we've actually been making mozzarella for quite some time here but since we have our own cow we're making a lot more than ever mozzarella is actually a very easy cheese to make it's a cheese that you can use fresh so you can use it the same day that you make it unlike cheddar and other cheeses that need to aged mozzarella is something that you can make and enjoy all in the same day there's only a few ingredients that you need we're gonna go through those and then we're gonna get busy making the cheese so for mozzarella cheese there's only four ingredients the first and most important ingredient is milk now because we have our own cow we're using fresh milk actually this was just milked this morning so we're using this it still has the cream and everything in it but if you don't have a cow you can either buy it directly from a local farmer which is what we recommend but if you can't do that either you can use store-bought milk you just want to make sure that you use whole milk from the store and make sure that it doesn't say ultra pasteurized pasteurized is okay but not ultra pasteurized the second ingredient which is probably the second most important is rennet you can get animal rennet or vegetable rennet we recommend animal rennet it just seems to work a little bit better for what we have used and it comes in different strengths so you want to make sure that when you order it you look it will tell you on the label how much to use to set up your milk the next ingredient is citric acid citric acid is used to raise the acidity of the milk before you put the rennet in citric acid is also what makes mozzarella cheese nice and stringy and makes it melt super good on your Pizza and then the final ingredient is salt salt you will use kind of to your own preference I'll give you some instructions but you can do it and add more if you'd like or less if you'd like now on our homestead we use pink Himalayan salt but you can use regular table salt or kosher salt whatever you have on hand or whatever your preference is so those are all of the ingredients mozzarella is super easy to make we should be able to make an entire batch in about 30 minutes so let's get started so before we get started heating the milk up on the stove there's a couple things that we need to prepare ahead of time first is our rennet what you want to do with your rennet is you want to again look at the instructions on the bottle but in our case we're using an animal rennet and this is right on the bottle that one 1/2 teaspoon will set up 2 gallons of milk so since we're using only one gallon of milk today we're gonna use 1/4 teaspoon so you'll take a quarter of a cup of cool water you want to make sure that it's non-chlorinated water so if you live in the city and you have chlorinated tap water either use bottled water or some other type of non-chlorinated water now where we live we have well water so I can just use tap water and our wild water is excellent so I'm going to add just a quarter of a teaspoon of rennet to the water and mix it around and that's all the rent that we need when you buy one of these bottles it may not look like you're getting much but you use such a small amount at a time that this bottle will last a long time I will put a link to all of these items in our Amazon shop as well so you guys can you know go look at them and know what to get the next thing is going to be our citric acid now this can be purchased online you can find it right at Walmart in the canning department this is a really common thing for anybody who does a lot of canning so for the citric acid we're going to use a cup of water and one and a half teaspoons of the citric acid we're going to put that in there and we're just going to let that dissolve completely and then we'll be ready to move on to getting our milk ready to actually turn it into mozzarella cheese now that our citric acid is completely dissolved in in the water we're going to go ahead and we're gonna dump that into our pot now you do want to use a pot that will hold probably two gallons you don't want to use a pot where the milk is going to end up coming right up to the top because you need room to be able to stir quite a bit now that the citric acid is in we're going to use one gallon of our milk and we're going to just put that right in the pot with the citric acid and water and we're just going to take a spoon we're just going to stir that around and make sure that that citric acid is completely incorporated into the milk again all we're doing at this point is trying to raise the acidity of the milk now that the citric acid is completely incorporated we're going to go ahead and turn on the burner we're going to heat the milk up to a hundred degrees you'll see some differences in different recipes but anywhere from 90 to 100 degrees is pretty good I like to do it to a hundred degrees it just seems to turn out a little bit better for me so we're going ahead and turn on the burner and once the burner is on you do want to stir the milk pretty much all the time otherwise it can burn on the bottom of the top now I'm just going to use a digital meat thermometer to tell me my temperature you can get fancy cheese thermometers but I just don't see a need for that as long as you have a pretty accurate thermometer you'll be fine so whatever type of thermometer you have this is where you want to start taking the temperature of your milk it'll get up to a hundred degrees quite a bit faster than you think it will so make sure you're checking it often so our milk is about ninety seven degrees so just a couple minutes and we'll be all ready to add our rennet and actually we're already there we're at a hundred degrees so now we're going to turn the heat off and we're going to move the pot to a cool burner now is when we're going to add the rennet the rennet is what actually turns it into cheese it separates the curds from the whey so we're going to be stirring this and we're going to slowly add our rennet now when you add the remnant you want to stir with your spoon kind of from a top bottom like this because you really want to make sure that you get all of the milk from the bottom of the pot mixed in if you just add this at the top and don't stir very well it'll start to kind of coagulate at the top and you'll never get the milk from the bottom incorporating it in so you want to add the rennet and stir like that for 30 seconds I think that's about good so now what we'll do is we'll put a cover on this and we'll let this sit for 10 minutes when we come back in 10 minutes you'll see a huge change in the way our milk looks so while we're waiting the 10 minutes for our rennet to separate the curds from the whey we also want to get another pot of water heating up we're going to turn this on back here and we're going to get this water heated up to 175 degrees we won't use this quite yet but we do need that water to be hot when we finally get to that step so get that going and get that up to 175 degrees all right our 10 minutes is up our timer is going off so now it's time to uncover this and look at what has happened during that 10 minutes so at first glance it may not look that much different but you can see when I take my finger that this has now turned into a big curd on the top of the milk so what we're going to do is we're going to take a knife and we're going to cut these curds into pieces we're going to try to cut them into as close as we can like one inch squares and this certainly doesn't have to be perfect what you're really doing is just breaking these into pieces so that in just a minute we can stir them around and it'll be easier to stir it sort of one big chunk alright so now that we have those cut into pieces we're going to turn our heat back on kind of a medium heat and we're gonna heat this up to a hundred and five degrees now that won't take very long because you already had it at a hundred degrees and it probably didn't cool down a whole lot during that ten minutes so you gotta watch it carefully while that's heating up we're gonna take our spoon and we're just gonna stir those curds around in the pot you can see how those have really turned into a nice curd and we're separating from the way the way is that yellow liquid and the curds are the white pieces and again we're gonna do this until it gets up to a 105 degrees and we are there so once it hits 105 degrees we're going to turn the heat back off and now we're just going to continue to stir this for five minutes you want to stir it constantly for the whole five minutes set a timer and we'll just keep stirring all right our timer has gone off our five minutes are up now we're going to bring our pot over and we're going to pour this through a colander to strain off all of the way now you can save this way and you can use it in our case what we do is we use it to give to our pigs because it's an awesome protein for the pigs but you can also use it as a soup base you can use it to replace other liquids in your baking it's just a really good healthy protein make sure you get all of the curds out and then we're going to just start using our hands to squeeze out as much of the extra way as we can and this will get quite a bit smaller in size as you do this and it'll start to form into a little bit of a ball it'll still be pretty you know it's separated at this point but the next step will take care of that so we're just going to keep squeezing this for probably you know three or four minutes until you feel like you're not getting much more liquid out and then we'll move on and I'll show you what that pot of water is for on the stove let me show you how much way we ended up with down here in the pot you can see that that is a good amount of way so now we're going to go get that pot of water off of the stove it's heated up to 175 degrees we're going to bring that over here now at this point what we're going to be doing is we're going to be putting the cheese back into the hot water to heat it up and then we're going to try to squeeze out some more way after that we'll get ready to stretch it and turn it into mozzarella if you have sensitive you may want to wear some like dishwashing gloves or something to help protect your hands at this point because it is gonna be pretty hot I tend to do it just barehanded but we'll see how that goes so we're gonna take our whole block here and we're gonna drop it down into our hot water and we're gonna leave it there on this first time for about 30 seconds to a minute we want to really heat it back up as much as we can okay so it's been about a minute maybe even a little longer what you're wanting is for your curd to get heated all the way through so it starts to get melty so we're gonna take it back out now it's really hot at this point so we're gonna put it back in our colander and I'm gonna actually use my spoon and my hands to try to see if we can get more way out of it you can see that it's starting to change the texture it's starting to look almost waxy or plastic he almost real shiny that's what you want that means it's turning into mozzarella so we're gonna try to squeeze out as much as we can after it's out of the water for a couple minutes you can start to you can start to use your hands it cools down pretty fast you can see how stretchy it's starting to get that's perfect that's what we want so from here on out I'm actually gonna break this into two pieces to make it a little bit easier to work with so we're gonna put it back into the hot water I'm going to leave it kind of flat so heats up a little faster in the hot water and we're gonna just put it back in for about another 30 seconds now there is a method of making mozzarella that also uses the microwave if you prefer that method that's fine I prefer to do it this way but if you want to use the microwave method instead of using this hot water you would just put your whole curd in a microwave safe Bowl and microwave it for 30 seconds at a time then take it out and do your stretching and everything put it back in for 30 seconds stretch it again you do that about 3 times but we're going to do the hot water method here today alright we're gonna take our pieces back out here and now they're getting really nice and melty so that's good we were put them back here we're gonna work them just a little bit and that was where I'm also going to salt them use a teaspoon and a half for the entire thing so I'm going to use about 3/4 of a teaspoon on each one you just sprinkle it on and then as you're working it and stretching it that's gonna incorporate into your cheese now if it starts to cool down to the point where you're having a hard time stretching it you're going to want to put it back in your hot water or if you're using the microwave method you're going to want to put it back in the microwave do the same thing with this piece here and again the salt is according to your case this is the amount that we like but if you like it saltier go ahead and add more [Music] I'm going to put these back into one piece here I'm going to put them back in the hot water for a minute and heat them back up all right take that back out now we're gonna try stretching again and be careful cause it's hot and you're just gonna keep doing this over and over the more you can stretch it the better your mozzarella is going to turn out at the end we're do it at least one more time after this so I'm gonna eat this back up one more time and we'll stretch it one more time all right that's nice and melty again so we're going to just bring it right out of the water and stretch it real good and the more you get to stretch the better this is turning into some really nice mozzarella all right I think that's probably about good so now what we're going to do is we're going to fold it back up we're gonna start turning it into a nice ball of mozzarella cheese the way that you do that is you just start working it with your hands you can see how nice and smooth that's getting on top [Music] and I'm by no means an expert at this part so once we have a nice ball we're all done that's all there is to making mozzarella what we're going to do now is we're going to put this in a some type of container to put in the refrigerator we're gonna cover it real tight so that the air stays out of it so that it doesn't dry out too much and then as soon as this is cooled down enough we'll be able to shred it and use it on our pizza well in our homestead we like to make as much as we can from things that we grew so this meal tonight our pizza now that we can make our own cheese is going to be almost a hundred percent from things that we have raised the only thing that won't will be is the flour from the wheat because we don't have enough room to grow our own week or we probably would we're gonna start off by making two things on the stovetop we're gonna start by making some pork sausage from the pigs that we raised last year and also some pizza sauce from our own home canned tomato sauce let's get started now we never can pizza sauce we just can tomatoes sauce and then turn it into pizza sauce when we want to make pizza makes it a lot more universal that way so we're going to start with just a pint of tomato sauce and some oregano that we dried from the herb garden this year we're just gonna mix that together and let it simmer that's really about all we use I probably had a little garlic powder and a little onion powder after it simmers for a while and then maybe just a teaspoon or so sugar if it's a little too acidic but other than that that's all we do and it turns out great so we're just gonna put this on a simmer and let that heat up while we make our pork sausage so while our sauce is simmering we're gonna start on the pork sausage now the pigs that we raise because the way we raised them back in the woods and they have so much room to run and just stay in shape they don't end up super fatty so the ground pork that reason today is super lean so because of that I'm going to put a little bit of our home rendered lard in the pan for I've got a pound of pork sausage from our pigs last year we always freeze all of our ground meat flat like this in the freezer because it thaws out really easy and can make a nice quick meal I'm going to be adding some of this a mild Italian sausage seasoning this is really salt so that you can make big quantities of sausage all at once well we just keep it in the cupboard like this and just just season the sausage as we need it or season the meat as we need it so for one pound we use a tablespoon of this seasoning and I have found that the easiest way to do that is just add it right to my ziploc bag zip it back up just work all of that sausage seasoning right in once that's all mixed up real good with all the seasoning we're just going to add the pork to our pan while the sausage is cooking and the sauce is simmering we're going to just slice up a couple veggies to put on our pizzas as well we're going to start with a nice onion and then we're also going to slice up a nice red pepper from the garden we went out yesterday and picked as many of the remaining peppers as we could out of the garden because tonight is our very first freeze warning for the year so whatever's out there after tonight isn't gonna be any good so we went out yesterday and picked as many as we could now these are sweet pepper these are not a hot pepper so we're just going to cut these as well all right so we got all of our veggies cut up we'll set those off to the side till later let's go check on the pork sausage and if that's done we're ready to start making our cross I think that looks done we'll just turn it off we'll leave it in the pan sauce is simmering nicely back here that'll thicken up nicely by the time we need it [Music] time to start making our crust okay so we're going to use my favorite pizza crust recipe today I've already done a video in depth video about how to make this so I'll leave a link to that but I'll just go over it briefly as we make it today today we're gonna make it with half whole-wheat flour and half organic all-purpose flour that makes it nice and light but still gives you some of those good whole grains from the whole wheat flour so we're going to use the 3/4 of a cup of each type of flour we're going to use 3/4 of a teaspoon of yeast 3/4 of a teaspoon of organic sugar and 1/4 teaspoon of the pink Himalayan salt so we're just going to pull all of those dry ingredients together we use our whisk and mix that up really well now to that we're going to add three tablespoons of oil I'm using sunflower oil and I like to add that with the whisk not with the billhook so I just have that in while the whisk is still running then we'll switch over to our dough hook and just add some nice warm water we've got our dough hook on so now we're gonna add 2/3 of a cup of warm water I don't add it all at once I would leave a little bit left back in case that was too much the humidity complained a lot of tricks on dough so one day things might be a little bit different than another day so all right our dough is done I've got a little bit of flour here spread out on my kneading board we're use a dough scraper to get the dough out of the bowl and like I said it'll be a little bit sticky at this point that's okay we'll just roll it on that dough or on that flower just like that and then we're going to cover it and we're gonna let it sit my original recipe said for 10 minutes I don't really time it anymore what I do is I go and turn the oven on I hit set it at 450 and when the oven is done preheating that's about 10 minutes and that's when I start using the dough ok our oven is preheated so it's time to start rolling out our dough now you do want to make sure you have plenty of flour to be rolling it onto a little stick you can do this right on your counter or if you have a kneading board like I have it works perfectly get a lot of flour on there and then we'll just start rolling it out now it depends on the size of your pizza pan how big you want to roll it out now this recipe can be doubled if you like a thicker crust or this is gonna be a fairly thin crust pizza today a little more flour on top so it doesn't stick now the easiest way to transfer this to your pizza pan is to fold it up and then just unfold it on your pan perfect then what I like to do is just take a fork and just tap it all over like this that way if there's any air pockets in the dough they won't turn into big bubbles in your oven so we're going ahead and put this in the oven for about five minutes before we start putting all of our toppings on all right well that crust is getting done in the oven for a few minutes let's take a look at the cheese that we made earlier look at how beautiful that is let's get it out of our Bowl here look at that that is an awesome piece of mozzarella cheese we need to shred this so that we can use it on our pizza because I won't do us much good just like this so let's go ahead and shred it I found the easiest way to do that is with a food processor you can't do it by hand but this is you a lot of time all right that's all shredded I think it did pretty well considering that like I said it wasn't super cold there we go if you believe we made that today that's awesome all right our dough is just about or our crust is just about ready to take out so let's set this aside we can start putting our pizza together all right so our crust is baked for five minutes it's perfect right now it's time to start adding all of our toppings let's start with our homemade sauce put as much as you like next we're gonna put on the homemade mozzarella I don't know if we'll need all of it but you got to have plenty of cheese on a pizza now get it spread out as well as you can but remember that this will melt so nice in the oven - all right now we're put our other toppings on and then we will sprinkle a little more cheese on top of those start with our sausage and now we'll put on our onions and peppers then we'll sprinkle a little more cheese on top kind of helps hold everything in place look how awesome that looks let's get that in the oven because I can hardly wait to eat it all right we're gonna put it in for about seven minutes to start with and we'll check on it and then from there on out just check it every few minutes until it's perfect and you'll all were much Brown you like on the top of the cheese okay okay Murr just went off it's been 11 minutes since we put it back in I think it's looking awesome look at that all right we need to let it cool off a little bit before we cut it and try some but can you believe that we made that we started with just a gallon of milk this morning made that cheese grew all of those veggies made the crust raise that pig that's awesome as soon as it cools down we're gonna cut it and give it a try all right it's cooled for a while let's cover it up and take a bite look at that that is awesome the cheese melted so nicely so there you go you guys that was a great day making cheese and then making this pizza completely from scratch I hope you enjoyed these types of videos we love to show you how we live here on the homestead and why we go to all the work that we do to raise our own food if you're enjoying our Channel but aren't a subscriber yet don't forget to hit the subscribe button before you leave if you do subscribe and you want to help us out the absolute best way that you can do that is to share our videos on all of your social media with people that you think would enjoy them and until next time thank you guys so much for stopping by the homestead take care and God bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 841,539

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, easy bread recipe, how to, mozzarella recipe, how to make mozzarella cheese, homemade mozzarella, how to make homemade pizza, homemade pizza homemade mozzarella, how to make pizza, how to make pizza crust, 30 minute mozzarella, 30 minute mozzarella no microwave, 30 minute homemade fresh mozzarella cheese, 30 minute mozzarella recipe, mozzarella cheese

Id: KBjrP_7ezDQ

Length: 30min 8sec (1808 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 12 2019