Today I crossed a big one off of the list of Things To Do Before I Die, namely, Make Cheese.  We made fresh mozzarella in class, and it was so easy it was almost anticlimactic.

Cheese making begins by curdling unpasteurized milk with rennet (an enzyme found in mammalian stomachs) or another acidic substance.  Liquid is drained off and the resultant dairy mass you are left consists of curds.  To make mozzarella, the curds (2 lbs of them) are submerged in hot (180 degrees), heavily salted (6 oz kosher salt) water.  The curds become pliable when stirred and warmed gently to a consistently lump-free texture; they are then removed from the hot brine and kneaded by hand into a striated, stretchy, smooth ball.  This process is referred to as “Pasta Filata“, which means “spun paste”.  After the paste is spun, the ball of mozz can be braided (called a “treccia“) or otherwise bundled and submerged in ice water to congeal; it can then be wrapped in plastic or stored in cooled brine.  It can be eaten fresh or smoked and eaten later.

We used our fresh mozz in class to make some pasta sauces, some dense little potato cakes with sopressata, and the mozzarella en carroza (”in carriages” - how cute!) sammies pictured above, as well as for liberal snacking.

If you want to make mozzarella at home I promise you that you have all of the equipment:  a pot, a colander that can be submerged in the pot, a spoon, a bowl for kneading and a bowl for ice water.  And you definitely have water, and you should have kosher salt. 

Getting the curds is marginally more complicated.  You can make your own - there are kits or you can order rennet and go completely DIY, and both options are available for mail order at New England Cheesemaking Supply Company (the site is a mess, but the owner wrote a great book on cheesemaking and is a real cheesvangelist). 

Alternately you can buy packaged curds.  If you live in NYC you can get them at Alleva, the latticini on Grand Street in Tiny Little Italy, and elsewhere you should check wherever mozzarella is made on site to see if you can score some curds to take home.  I’m sure Pittsburgh, Boston, Providence or any once-gloriously Italian enclave have such storefronts. 

And in a very loosely related note, I may be alone, but I thought that the ending of The Sopranos was sublime.

Waldemar and Nadia hosted a cheese tasting at Vin Noir this evening.  We had five tasty cheeses, the standout being Montenebro, a rich, complex goat cheese made outside of Madrid (sitting at about 8 o’clock on the plate above).  We tasted each cheese with an acidic Loire white, an Austrian red (which was a crowd pleaser, and which I enjoyed with the Bleu D’Auvergne [4 o’clock, above], but which on its own smelled to me of durian and petrol) and the standout beverage of the evening: La Meule, a sage-infused blonde ale from Switzerland.  I LOVED this beer.  It is superfragrant, nice hops and has fine, ample carbonation.  I’ll be on the lookout to find it in retail. 

What made this tasting especially fun were the high spirits of the hosts.  Waldemar and Nadia are very knowledgeable cheese pros, but they encourage interesting conversation and appreciation from all cheese skill levels.  Like me, Nadia has a corporate background; she left Finance to devote herself to cheese a few years ago and I was inspired to chat with someone who had made this kind of leap successfully, and with so much joy.