A recent pizza, with our own tomatoes, basil and oregano, plus mozzarella courtesy of our goats:
Chesnok Red and Bavarian Purple garlic, harvested today. Kind of small, but pungent. Next year they’ll go into richer, looser ground, and today I’ll have garlic scapes and new potatoes (couldn’t resist digging just a few!) for every meal:
yum!!!!
That looks goood!
How do you make the cheese?
The Mozzarella was really “fake-zarella”. The recipe came from a recipe book published by Ruminations Magazine. Here it is roughly from memory (If you’re interested, I can ask permission to publish the actual recipe as it is in the book – this is off the top of my head, and I slightly modified the recipe based on similar ones found online).
Pour 2 gallons of goat milk into a double-boiler, acidify with citric acid (I used lemon juice, worked fine and gave a nice hint of lemon). Heat to about 90 degrees and stir in rennet. Allow to coagulate for about 15 minutes, cut into cubes (still in boiler), and raise heat another 20 degrees while gently stirring. Drain curd into a colander and let it drip for a while, then cut it into long strips about 1″x1″ in cross-section. Return these to the pot with just enough hot, salted whey to cover them, and slowly raise heat to 170. Then you use a wooden spoon to stretch the strips of curd by lifting them and letting gravity pull them longer. Eventually the cheese will appear “plasticy”. Drain again, and knead the cheese on a cutting board as you would do with bread dough. Shape and cool.
I’ve made this a few times; it’s certainly not the same as the fresh mozzarella one would get from a good Italian deli, but it’s stretchy and very tasty. A little slow to melt, but that worked out fine for pizza.
Once I made some sort of mistake, and it came out kind of hard and dry….but grated finely like a parmesan, it went very nicely on top of pasta with tomato sauce, and seemed to last a little longer that way.
thanks! that’s a post in itself. do you use vegetable (microbial) rennet? I wonder if i could use the ultra pasturized (cows) milk from the store and get similar results.
I used regular animal-derived tablet rennet, but as far as I know the veggie stuff works fine (but cost WAY more).
I don’t know if the pasteurized milk would make a difference, though it would be less fatty than whole, raw milk is. Definitely avoid store-bought goat milk; I’ve never had any that didn’t taste and smell like a dirty goat – whereas our fresh stuff is pretty indistinguishable from cow.
Wow that looks really yummy
m m m m dinner . . . i’ll be right there 🙂