Making Mozzarella Cheese kits

So now we are at the end of January and frustrated gardener syndrome is taking full hold. I want to be out doing all the things I have planned for the garden, sowing seeds and generally out working with plants and being creative. But the garden is still covered in snow and in the grip of minus temperatures, so the snow and me are going no where fast. I have all my seeds ordered in, including Daniel's vegetable seeds for his veg plot (we can't even get that dug over).

Still plenty snow

So today we are keeping warm and being creative in the kitchen. David was given a cheese making kit for Christmas, his reputation as a cheeseaholic is well known. This kit from a Scottish company allows to to make either mozzarella or ricotta (or both if you split the ingredients).

The cheese making kit

Some of the ingredients

Heating up the milk and citric acid

Thermometer supplied with the kit

Interestingly, another blogger who's blog I read had also been given this kit for Christmas and I was curious to see how he had found using the kit. See his efforts here Mark's veg Plot. We are having the same issues he had, even though we are using a microwave, it's not making stretchy ball shaped mozzarella! At the moment it is looking more like cottage cheese squeezed into a balll. David is persevering... we will have mozarella!

The whey once the curds have been removed

Kneading the curds

Two cheesaholics!
Bracken making sure David does it right

Beginning to have a more mozzarella look about it

Constant heating and kneading is making it look more like mozzarella, and when you think about it, having watched mozarella being made on TV, its constantly in and out of a vat of very hot liquid. After a lot of heating and kneading, much more than it says in the instructions, and at the point of boredom, the "cheese" began to come together and made a ball!

A ball of Mozzarella

A bit crumbly but not bad

Lunch

 At this point we decided to quit while we were ahead. Having used an eigth of a kit it gave us a ball of cheese somewhere between a golf ball and tennis ball, not alot for that amount effort, David reckons if we made the whole kit at one go it would make 16 balls of cheese, using 8 x 4litres bottles of milk. Thats alot of milk. It was an interesting thing to do and we will finish the kit at some point.