Milking It for All Its Worth

Gaia answered again! I had wanted to find a local, inexpensive source for raw milk and it just showed up in my e-mailbox! Thank you, thank you, Gaia! We picked these up, direct from the farmer, the day after the cow was milked. Talk about fresh! AND for the same price I pay for organic milk at the store!

I had grand plans for these little beauties, but first, I wanted to sterilize everything in boiling water. I uttered one of those sentences you never thought you'd hear yourself say when I was on the phone with my mother explaining what I was doing that day. "Oh, right now, I'm sterilizing my ice cubes." She didn't know quite how to respond to that.

Pour the milk in, heat it up some, add some citric acid, heat it up some more, add some rennet, and bingo bango, look what happens!

Scoop out the curds, heat up the remaining whey really hot, ball up the curds, dunk them in the whey, and it starts acting like cheese!

So, in less than an hour, we turned a gallon of milk into four creamy little balls of mozzarella. Here they are getting chilled in their sterlized ice bath.

We tried to make ricotta from the leftover whey, but screwed it up. We will be trying again and next time, we'll know a little bit more about what not to do. We would have tried for cream cheese and butter from the other gallon, but the kids drank it all.