Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Cheese Please

On Saturday, I visited my daughter to show a couple of friends and her how to make mozzarella cheese. I became curious about cheese making after reading Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and asked for a kit for Christmas. It was fun to do and quite tasty. I do it now with my fourth graders after our herbs are big enough to snip. We make the cheese, pizza sauce and the dough during our study of matter.
I was particularly excited this time because my brother-in-law brought me some raw milk from the country. I had never used raw milk before. It was awesome and worked so much better than pasteurized milk.


Handy Man said there was an article in today's paper about people getting sick from raw milk. Well, when you make the cheese, for a proper stretch it has to heat to 135 degrees, so it's fine. I've also drank milk from the same place, as has many in my family with no problems. First you heat it ninety degrees.
You stir in the rennet (an enzyme from the fourth stomach of a ruminating animal, yummy) and these lovely curds form.

You heat and squeeze, heat and squeeze until all the whey is out.
Then you stretch it until it's finished. Then you use the whey to make pizza dough. Rae-rae uses the whey to soak grains in to be better digested. I feed the leftovers to my chickie girls who think it's delightful!

Sweet, pretty girls.

Delicious pizza. The left is pepperoni with peppers and right is sundried tomatoes with goat cheese.

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