Why Bother? 2012 - Mozzarella Cheese

After my success with ricotta cheese, I was very excited try my hand at a little more involved cheese - mozzarella.  However, there was one problem.  New Jersey was conspiring against me in this particular challenge. 

After much reading, leafing through multiple cookbooks and cruising the blogosphere, it was the general consensus that you should use raw milk to make your mozzarella cheese.  Unpasteurized, non-homogenized, raw milk.  There was just one problem to my obtaining said raw milk, it is illegal in New Jersey to commercially sell raw milk. 

I couldn't find it in my supermarket, at any of the small co-ops or sitting in a cooler at the farmers market.  Raw milk is a precious, and apparently illegal, commodity.  Over the past few years, groups have brought bills to the state senate to legalize the sale of raw milk.  As of right now there is a bill with the Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee that would allow the sale of raw milk under certain conditions, whatever that means.

Due to the current laws of the Garden state, the only way for me to get raw milk would be to cross a border into either Upstate New York or Pennsylvania.  I know there are lots of dairy farms upstate, but I thought it would be a little excessive to drive over seventy miles just to buy milk.  That would be one expensive gallon of milk.  Instead, I went to Whole Foods and bought a gallon of organic, pasteurized milk.  If you can get your hands on raw milk, I'm a little jealous of you!  If you can't, just be sure to buy milk that isn't homogenized.  That won't work at all.

With the raw milk drama behind me, I was able to get down to cheese business.  Along with my organic milk, I got out a big (non-reactive) pot, my jar of citric acid (not from the lab!) and my rennet tablets.  Sounds a bit like a science experiment, right?  Here's a breakdown of what everything is doing.

You need a non-reactive pot, which is any pot made of clay, enamel or stainless steel.  Do not use your fancy copper or aluminum pans.  Copper and aluminum will react with the acid you will be adding to the milk and impart a metallic taste on your cheese.  I used a stainless steel Dutch oven.

Citric acid is one of the most common acids found in your house.  Those oranges, lemons, limes and grapefruits are sour because of their high concentration of citric acid.  You need to use it to sour the milk.  What you are actually doing is changing the pH of your milk.  As you lower the pH of the milk from nearly neutral (around 6.8) to slightly acidic (roughly 4.6), the proteins in the milk precipitate, separating from the liquid whey.  I got my citric acid from the King Arthur Flour online store.


Hi, I'm citric acid!

Rennet is a bunch of enzymes that we use to coagulate the milk and completely separate the curds from the whey.  Chemically, rennet is a protease.  This means that it breaks down the proteins, breaking bonds of the amino acids and making the proteins smaller.

All these sciency things come together to make delicious cheese.  And it was a very fun and non-sciency process.  I'd recommend making mozzarella cheese to everyone.  Does it taste much different from store bought fresh mozzarella?  There isn't a huge difference, especially if you get yours at a farmers market or Italian deli, but yours will definitely be fresher!

Curried Chicken with Coconut Rice

I have been cohabitating with boyfriend for just over a year now and while we have lots of fun and it's great to see him every day, there are some things that I miss...

My mess.  When living on your own, any mess you make is your own mess.  It's your own responsibility to clean up, or not clean up, your living space.  My apartment was tiny, so it got dirty and cluttered pretty quickly.  During the week, I would treat my apartment as a landing pad.  I would throw down my stuff, eat a bowl of salad, change into my PJs and go to bed.  Things would pile up.  Dishes, clothes, books.  Come Sunday I would clean it all up and start fresh.  Now there is my mess and boyfriends mess.  You don't even want to see our apartment right now.

My big fluffy bed.  I bought a grown-up bed my second year of graduate school.  It was a full size, double-pillowtop cloud of a bed.  I had to climb into it at night and jump down in the morning.  I piled it high with pillows and covered it in a white, king size, down comforter.  While it was the most amazing bed ever sewn, it would be a little cozy for two people.  I sold my beautiful bed to a fellow grad student and moved my fluffy pillows to New Jersey.

My all day cooking sessions in my tiny studio kitchen.  When living in 300-square feet, with a kitchen that took up half of that space, the cooking took over the entire living space.  I would have marshmallows setting on my TV stand, a cutting board on my tiny cafe table and two burners running on my stovetop.  With working long hours in the lab all week long, I had to cram all my cooking into one day.  These days I can cook dinner every night and spend my weekends with boyfriend.

All in all, I'll take the two-person mess, less fluffy bed and spread out cooking schedule.  Boyfriend is a pretty fun roommate.

Oreo Cupcakes

Did you know that New Jersey is actually quite hilly?  Up until a few weeks ago, I didn't realize this either.  I came to this revelation after boyfriend and I decided to take a ride to the zoo on our new bikes.

This was a few weeks ago, just after boyfriend and I had assembled our brand new bikes.  Personally, I like to just go out and ride my bike.  Boyfriend is more of a destination rider.  He likes to have a goal, rather than an open-ended ride.  It helps him strive to get there faster, since he knows there is an end in sight.  It was a hot and sunny Sunday afternoon and boyfriend suggested we head to the zoo for an afternoon of animal watching and llama petting.

The ride looked totally feasable, just over five miles, pretty direct route and wide sidewalks, this would be a breeze.  Too bad we didn't plan properly for the ride we were about to take.  First, the temperature quickly topped ninety-five degrees over the course of our ride.  Next, to make the extreme heat even worse, we managed to leave our water bottles on the counter. 

Things only got worse as we continued biking away.  With the mercury in the thermometer bursting out the top, our final right turn brought us onto a freshly black-topped road.  Heat was emanating off of the dark road, you could see waves in the air.  And there was one last bit of torture for the ride...

That's right, a big, scary hill.  I just about died.  We kept thinking that the hill would eventually come to an end.  Or that we would find a convenience store where we could buy some water.  Or that someone would be watering their lawn and we could lay down in the sprinklers.  Sadly, the hill went on and on. 

Yet when we made it to the top (not without stopping to walk our bikes for a good portion!) we were proud to make it to the top and happy to see a McDonalds.  These days we are sure to bring lots of water with us when we hit the road and to check a topographical map before we leave home!