Mozzarella

I thought I'd try making cheese - something I've always been interested in, but never got around to trying.  I started from a recipe I found here.  However, I've tweaked some amounts based on how ingredients come here, and I've used a conversion I found here to substitute lemon juice for citric acid tablets.

3 litres of whole, unhomogenized pasteurized milk
1/4 cup + 2 tsp lemon juice
1/4 rennet tablet
1/4 cup dechlorinated water

Dechlorinate the water ahead of time by letting it sit, in as much sunlight as possible, for 24 hours.  Or boil it and return to room temp.  Dissolve rennet in water.  Milk + lemon juice in a thick-bottomed pan.  Heat to 90 F.

Add rennet.  Cover and wait 10 minutes and check.  Repeat (this, in my limited experience, usually takes _at least_ a couple of cycles) until the curd has solidified and the whey is reasonably clear and yellowish.  Cut into 1 inch squares, making sure to get right to the bottom of the pan.  Let sit for 5 minutes, to express the whey.

Heat to 105 F, stirring gently and occasionally; you're not worried about breaking up the lumps of curd particularly, but you aren't trying to mix them back in either - don't overdo the stirring.

The recipe then says to spoon the curds out.  I tried this the first time and found it nigh-impossible to catch the slimy little things.  This time I'm trying a colander over a bowl to catch the whey.  This seems to have worked all right, though you have to keep rolling the colander around to drain properly.

Let rest for 10 minutes.

At this point the recipe says to use the whey to heat the curds - heating the whey to 180 F, then dipping the curd in repeatedly until it is hot enough to stretch.  When I tried this the first time, I found the pot wasn't deep enough to really get at things properly.  The videos I've watched online, however, show the curd heated until it stretches by pouring salted hot water over it in a bowl.  I compromised by heating the whey to 180 F, adding a bit of salt, and pouring it over the curd in the bowl.  Started with about half and added more as I needed more heat.  You need to get the cheese to ~135 F, apparently, so the liquid needs to be hotter than that, and you'll want to wear gloves.  When it's hot enough, it will stretch without tearing and look, essentially, like string cheese...

Stretch it out two or three times, then glob it together in a mass, hold a thumb and forefinger together in a loop, and push the cheese through - essentially stuffing it inside itself.  This makes nice smooth-sided balls.

You can twist off multiple balls at this point.  Mash the open bit at the end together a bit to seal it, and drop the balls into a bowl of cool water, so they retain their shape.  Salt lightly.

Eat.