Homemade Mozzarella Cheese Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the best milk to make mozzarella cheese? ›

Milk for Mozzarella: Almost any milk can be used for making mozzarella: whole, 2%, skim, cow, goat, raw, organic, or pasteurized. Pasteurized milk is fine to use, but make sure that it is not ultra high temperature (UHT) pasteurized. The proteins in UHT milk have lost their ability to set into curds.

One gallon of milk will make 1-1.25 lbs. of mozzarella. The following recipe is for one gallon (3.78 liters) of milk. Follow the usage rates for any ingredient you place into the milk listed on the ingredient.

A quick Google search for homemade mozzarella will give you an emphatic yes: There are countless recipes for fresh mozzarella and dozens of different DIY kits for sale, all of which promise better-than-store-bought results.

If you want to make the real deal stretchy mozzarella, then you will need to use rennet. Substituting white vinegar for rennet will leave you with more of a farmers cheese. There is a way to make it somewhat like mozzarella, but it will be more crumbly and not stretchy.

The most widely used rennet substitutes are Miehei coagulant (R. miehei proteinase), Pusillus coagulant (R. pusillus proteinase), and Parasitica coagulant (C. parasitica proteinase).

Cheese Yield From One Gallon

The yield of cheese from one gallon of milk is approximately one pound for the hard cheese and two pounds for the soft cheese. The amount of butterfat in the milk will affect this. Sheep milk for example, is 9% butterfat, so the yield will be much higher than Goat or Cow milk.

Homemade mozzarella cheese is fresher and more flavorful than the stuff you buy in the store. It requires a few special materials and a bit of patience, but the end result is worth it.

With proper storage in a refrigerator, mozzarella cheese can last for up to one to two weeks. In a freezer, mozzarella cheese can last longer, up to approximately three months. If you find any change of shape, color, taste, and aroma of any part of the cheese, cut and throw away that part.

You will need a gallon (3.8 litres) of full fat milk to make just about 1.3lbs (590g) of fresh mozzarella. I picked up a gallon of milk for $2.99 and the cheapest fresh mozzarella I could find was about $7 for a pound. Including the other ingredients, it still works out at less than half the price for making your own.

Whereas fresh mozzarella is packaged as balls in liquid for near-term consumption, traditional mozzarella (also known as aged, block or processed mozzarella) is packaged dry in blocks—or in cubes, chunks, sticks, slices or shreds that have been cut from blocks—for less immediate consumption.

Can you make mozzarella without citric acid? ›

White vinegar with an acidity level of 4-6% and lemon juice are commonly used for making mozzarella cheese. The acidity of lemon juice typically falls within the range of 4-6% citric acid too. Therefore, you can easily replace the white vinegar in this recipe with an equal amount of lemon juice.

How is mozzarella produced? Traditionally, this Italian string cheese is made through the acid curdling process. This involves adding lemon juice or vinegar to the milk in order to make proteins coagulate. The curdled milk is then heated and stretched until it takes the stringy texture we all know.

The lemon juice, vinegar and citric acid can coagulate the milk without rennet but frequently work best with hot milk.

The short answer is yes. In a traditional farmstead cheese operation, some calves which are born are killed because their mothers produce milk for human consumption. And in many of these calves, rennet is obtained from their stomach lining to coagulate the milk in one of the first stages of cheesemaking.

In Italy, the cheese is produced nationwide using Italian buffalo's milk under the government's official name mozzarella di latte di bufala because Italian buffalo are present in all Italian regions.

mozzarella, mild, smooth-textured cheese made in its authentic Italian version from the milk of the water buffalo; imitations of varying quality are commonly made of cow's milk.

If you are not using ultra-pasteurized milk you can attempt to make cheese, however, because it is milk that has been processed and treated the results can be inconsistent. Ultra-pasteurized (UP) or Ultra-high temperature (UHT) milk. These types of milk are treated with extreme processes of heating and cooling.

For the purists, the best mozzarella comes from buffalo milk, not cow milk.