Tuesday, 8 July 2008

Homemade mozzarella

A couple of days ago at work, we attempted to make mozzarella after obtaining some delicious buffalo milk from Laverstock park. Laverstock Park is in Overton, Hampshire and is owned by Jody Scheckter(former Formula 1 champion). Their farm covers 2500 acres and breed Angus and Hereford cows, pigs, sheep, wild boar, poultry, and water buffalo. Their breeding methods are designed to improve the quality of the meat by growing their animals slower with a more natural diet. They are online and have an online shop that you can browse through.
We got a few litres of the buffalo milk and had some good results with our mozzarella. Now to put the cheese into action on the tasting menu.

These are American measurements:
1 gallon Water buffalo milk
2 tspn Citric acid
1/4 tspn Vegetarian rennet

Place the milk into a saucepan and mix in the citric acid. Slowly bring to 85F stirring constantly. Add the rennet at 85F and continue heating to 105F. Remove from the heat and let sit for 15 mins. Seperate the curd from the whey(curd is the solids and whey is the milky liquid). Squeeze the curd together and place in a bowl and add a little water and heat through a microwave oven for 1 minute or until the cheese is past warm. Wearing gloves , knead the cheese for a while whilst warm until it is smooth and forms a ball. From here you can shape it how you want, we made regular round ball and boccocini size. You then season the whey with salt and submerge your mozzarella ball into this liquid and leave for a few days.
Next my thoughts are to flavour the milk or stuff the mozzarella with truffle jam or confit tomato. We'll see, watch this space!



No comments:

Post a Comment