Since eating a pizzeria Bianco, I have wanted an excuse to make fresh mozzarella and I finally got a chance by making a "snack" bread for the bakery. Basil Pistuo with melted mixed peppers, nicoise olives, garlic confit, olive oil, then baked and after cooling grating fresh mozzarella on top with black pepper and fleur de sel.



So I have watched couple video's on you tube, went to two demo's and realized there is few basic steps but so many people do it different. What I see is you want to create three things "melt" the curd and "salt" the curd then "pull" the curd to bring everything together and make smooth, then drop into ice water to set.

Seems pretty straight forward well here is a few problems and solutions we came up with.



We made one the brine to salty and the second not enough salt so I needed this to be weighted out to make sure every time its consistent, what we start with is the water weight equals 100% then multiply that by 8% for the weight of the salt everything into a pot and cook to 165F.

So the next problem is the water was to hot and we lost some milk fat from the curd, so to fix that we bought a thermometer that we could attach to the side of the pot and has a alarm when the water gets to high.



Tried rolling the fresh mozzarella while warm into a clean tourchon (log) with plastic wrap but I felt it compacted the cheese seamed more like commercial mozzarella made good string cheese.

We also tried flavoring the brine water on one batch, with fresh Oregano and it tasted good a little different almost a rosemary flavor.



Last batch we made it straight forward mozzarella and flavored the olive oil we packed it in basil in one, garlic and peppers in one, the one I liked the most was Lemon Zest and Olive Oil very nice citrus notes.

So today we have all the knowledge that we learned from trial and error, and started out to make thing the best we could.



In the pictures it shows the work station, we set up a pan with holes into a bigger pan to hold the water, that way we could just bring the curd out of the water. The ice bath right there so after pulling it could be dropped in the bath.

After pulling we shaped the cheese long and skinny without pulling to much I figured the more surface area the faster the mozzarella would cool, plus I was not worried about looks it is more about preserving the milk fat inside the curd, the end product will be grated.

After cooling we dry off water and package in Extra Virgin Olive Oil in zip lock bags to keep from drying out.

The plated one has us having fun, its pulled to order mozzarella with melted mixed peppers toy box tomatoes, petit Basil, grilled Baguette.

Warm freshly pulled Mozzarella on a sandwich with vine ripe tomatoes, fresh garden basil nothing trendy about that just really good stuff.

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