Hands-on activity: Let’s Get Cheesy!

If you enjoyed making your own Neapolitan margherita pizza, you may want to take your culinary skills to the next level by making your own mozzarella. One of our Group Leaders, Jillian, shared her homemade Italian mozzarella recipe with us, and we couldn’t wait to share it with you! As you might have seen in our pizza recipe, mozzarella originated in the south of Italy by taking fresh, non-pasteurized buffalo milk, heating it to just the right temperature, and adding a few additional ingredients. After the milk undergoes several transformations, the final step is to stretch and pull the cheese by hand until it’s ready to eat or chill for future use.

At first glance, mozzarella seems easy enough to make. You don’t need any fancy equipment and it doesn’t require too many ingredients. From there you just combine the ingredients, separate out the liquids, then stretch the leftover solids like taffy until you’ve got the string cheese that no road trip or snack box is complete without. But take a closer look and you’ll see that to get it right, you’ve got to keep a close eye on critical transformations and your cooking thermometer.Whether you remain an amateur mozzarella maker or become an expert, we hope youenjoy this adventure into cheese making!

Before we get started, let’s review some vocabulary:

Tips & tricks: Making mozzarella is a combination of art and chemistry. You’ll need the right equipment and ingredients and you’ll have to pay close attention to the temperature of the milk as the curds separate from the whey and transform into the stretchy delight of mozzarella.Keep in mind, this is science and science is a process of trial and error. Most importantly, remember to just have fun.

Preparation:

Turn on the heat:

Take it even further! How did your mozzarella turn out? Was it stretchy? Creamy? Salty? If you enjoyed this homemade Italian mozzarella recipe, go even further by introducing your own alterations and adjustments. You could try using heavy cream, half and half, or skim milk. You could add curds and cream into the center of your mozzarella to make burrata. Or, now that you’ve got some fresh mozzarella, if you’ve learned how to make pizza dough, why not get some fresh tomatoes and make your own sauce too? Then, with a basil garnish, serve up a pizza that might just transport you to the south of Italy this summer.