Today, I’m going to show you how to make homemade mozzarella cheese using pretty much just two ingredients:
- Milk white
- Distilled vinegar
Now, there are a few recipes out there on how to make your own mozzarella cheese, and one of the popular ones involves using citric acid and a product called rennet. But you don’t have to use those. You can make it with vinegar instead, and that’s the method I am going to show you right now. Really easy to do, simple ingredients. If I can do it, you can do it. Before I move on, make sure to subscribe to my channel and hit that notification bell so you don’t miss out on any of my new videos. Let’s get started.
Detailed Recipe Along with Pictorial Step Wise Details of How to Make Homemade Mozzarella Cheese
Down below in the description box, you’ll find a list of the ingredients and their amounts. Here we go. So, I have some raw milk here, and I got this at my local Sprouts. You can find it at places like Whole Foods or Natural Grocers. But if you can’t find raw milk, you can use pasteurized whole milk. But don’t use ultra-pasteurized, okay? So, use either just normal pasteurized whole milk or raw milk. And so, I’m going to take this—this is one half gallon, or 1.89 liters—and I’m going to pour it all in this large pot. This is my Dutch oven.
Okay, now over to the stovetop we go. Here we are over at the stovetop, and I have the heat on the burner set to in between medium-low and medium. So, on my setting, it goes from one to nine for the heat, so I have it set to a four. We don’t want to heat it up super fast, but we’re going to stir and heat it until it reaches 115 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about 46 Celsius. And it doesn’t have to be exact; it could be between 115 and 120 Fahrenheit, so between 46 and 48 Celsius, around there. And the reason why we want to stir while we are heating it up is you want it to heat up very evenly.
Alright, we got to 115, 116, that is great. And now what I’m going to do is I’m going to take that vinegar, this is seven tablespoons of white distilled vinegar, and pour it all in there. And then I’m going to take my slotted spoon here and just stir a little bit, kind of taking it from the sides, and go in 35 seconds or so. And you can see it’s already starting to curdle, alright? And then turn off the heat, and then I am going to take my lid and put the lid on and let it sit for five minutes. Once the five minutes are up, we will take off the lid, and you’ll see the cheese develop on the top. Now, if you’re using citric acid and rennet, then it’ll develop a thin film, kind of like custard on the top, and then you’ll cut through it with a knife.
And now we want to gather up the curd, so we’ll take a spoon and we’ll just take that, see that, that’s the curd, and we’ll take it and squish it together into itself, and it should come together pretty nicely. Definitely depends on the type of milk that you use. The raw milk, it comes together a lot better than just using normal pasteurized milk, but it’ll still work. I’ve done it with both types. And now what I want to do is I want to transfer this to a bowl. There’s the cheese right there. Make sure to get it all out.
Okay, I’m gonna set this aside and take my cheese here. Now there’s way too much liquid and whey with the cheese right now, and so we want to squeeze all the extra whey out that we can. And so I have some gloves here; you can use clean hands as well. You don’t have to use the gloves, but it’s always a good idea to use gloves with the cheese. Okay, and then I’m just going to grab this in my hand and just kind of squeeze it and put it back together and squeeze it. I’m not squeezing at this point, I’m not squeezing too hard yet. I’m going to take this extra whey and pour it over here in a big pot. And then you can also take it down and just push on it and squeeze it like this and knead it a little bit, and that lets you get some extra pressure.
Okay, I’m going to dry out this bowl real quick. I got most of the whey out of the cheese and take the ball of cheese and put it back in here. And now we want to bring up the temperature of this cheese to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. There’s a couple of ways that you can do that. You can reheat the whey, that’s a common method, reheat the whey to about 160 to 170 and then immerse the cheese into that, and that’ll help it get to temp. Or just use the microwave. I’m going to put this in the microwave for about 30 seconds and then check the temp, stretch it a little bit, 30 seconds until we get up to 160 Fahrenheit.
Okay, I’m going to test it. It’s about 135. Also, if there’s any extra whey in there, I’m going to pull it out and remove it. Okay, and we can stretch it a little bit, push it down a little bit, get some more of that whey out. Okay, and into the microwave once again for about 25 to 30 seconds. Almost there, almost at temp. Okay, yep, right about there. And now I’m just going to spin this a little bit, get some more of that whey out. And it’s going to be really hot; that’s just amazing ball of cheese. And eventually, you should be able to get it in your hands and just keep pushing it and stretch it. Look at that, yeah, stretch it. And you can form it into a ball, just keep going in your hands and kind of tucking it, cupping it. We’re just getting it so it’s nice and ball-shaped.
Okay, and then I have some water. Once you get to that point, I got some water here; I’m going to just dump it right in that water. And so, we’re going to just start cooling down the cheese, and that just is cool like cool water, it’s not super cold yet. I’m going to let it sit in there for about 10 minutes, and then after about 10 minutes, I’m going to get some ice cubes and just cool down the water even more and let it sit in there for another five minutes or so.
Alright, and once the cheese has chilled, we can take it out, and there it is, that is our block of mozzarella. And now what about this leftover whey? What can you do with that? There’s a lot of things you can do with the leftover whey. Instead of just dumping it down the drain, you can use it.