Failure means I'm learning, right?

Two posts on the same day?? I know, it's a bit out of the ordinary, but I thought I'd share so you'd all know that there is something out there that I can't do (yet).

When I moved into my apartment, my brother asked what he could get me for a house warming gift...I didn't know. Eventually, he sent me a cheese making kit-something we'd talked about, but I'd never gotten around to trying.

I immediately called a friend to figure out where I could get some good milk, and headed out the next day for a gallon of milk. Matthew said the mozzarella was good, and easy, and I love to make pizza here at home, so that was what I decided to try. I got out everything I'd need, and started making a mess of my kitchen.


Here's the milk cooking...

Eventually, you get to a point where the milk should separate-curds and whey. This looked to me like the picture in my recipe book, so I headed on to the next step.

This is where I ran into trouble. I put the curds back on the stove and pushed them around with my spoon. At this point, I was supposed to drain off the whey and pull the curds like taffy.


There was no getting the curds out with a slotted spoon, so I resorted to a colander. It was not until I poured the whey I didn't use for bread down the drain that I discovered just how many curds I really lost...but that's neither here nor there. At this point, the curds are supposed to be in a state where they can be pulled like taffy. There was no pulling. They fell apart in my hands. Naturally, I called Matthew to try to figure out where I'd gone wrong. With some encouragement from him, I walked across the street for another gallon of milk and tried again.

As you can see, the result was not much better. I can handle not getting it right once, but twice was pushing it! This seemed a little more like cheese, but still not right, and it tasted pretty bad.

It's been a couple of weeks now, and I spent some time reading up on other methods of making mozzarella. I thought I had a handle on things, so I bought another gallon of milk so I could try again. Today was the day for trying, but the cheese gods were not kind to me. Below is today's result-not any better than the first two.
While I haven't completely given up the idea of making my own cheese, I think the next attempt will have to be when I'm in the same city as Matthew so he can give me some pointers about where I'm going wrong.