Making and Cutting the Cheese

When does a fart joke ever get old? Never. I’ll still crack up over a fart joke when I’m a 110 and stinking up the nursing home.

We made mozzarella cheese this morning using creamline milk:

The better-half called the creamery the other day and said we want to make cheese which of your bottles should we buy. They said creamline. We hadn’t a clue what that meant until we opened the bottle and had to break through the cream line:

By the way, we ate that cream. It was strangely delicious…strangely because who gets to eat chunky cream out of a milk bottle? I think dairy farmers have it going on.

So, you stir citric acid into milk, heat it (carefully monitoring the temp.), wait, add rennet and cut it. Then it looks like this:

It’s surprising how much whey will come off the cheese, but you just have to get as much off of it as you can. Then you heat the curd and get more whey off of it. And, finally, you stretch it!

After stretching it, you put it in an ice bath. We pinched some warm cheese off to it to taste and then cleaned up the kitchen while the cheese cooled off.

Then we cut the cheese (see, still funny):

We have another gallon of milk in the refrigerator and I think we’re going to try putting some herbs in the next batch of cheese. Because now that we’ve done it once, it’s time to get creative.