Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [87]
1 gallon whole milk (see headnote)
1½ teaspoons citric acid
¼ teaspoon liquid rennet
¼ cup kosher salt
1. Pour the milk into a large pot and stir in the citric acid.
2. Heat the milk to 90 degrees F. This is just barely warm, not even close to hot. Remove the pot from the heat and slowly stir in the rennet, using an up-and-down motion. Cover the pot and let it sit for 5 minutes.
3. Gently probe the curds with the side of a spoon. They should look like broken custard or tofu, with a clear separation between the thick curd and the watery whey. If you don’t see well-defined curd, put the top back on the pot and let it rest a few more minutes.
4. When it is ready, with a long knife, gently break the curd into 1-inch cubes.
5. Place the pot back on the stove and heat to 110 degrees F, gently swirling the curds around with a spoon. Remove from the heat and continue to stir gently for 2 minutes.
6. Scoop the curds into a sieve set over a large bowl. Return the whey to the pot and heat to 175 degrees F. Add the salt.
7. Put on rubber gloves. Divide the curd into two rough balls, give them each a good squeeze, and drop them both into the hot whey. Knead, stretch, and pull the mozzarella balls, one at a time, folding each ball over on itself and working it like taffy. If it starts to tear instead of stretch, dip it back in the whey. Keep kneading and stretching until you have a smooth, shiny, cohesive cheese. Form it into a tight ball and drop it into a bowl of ice water for a few minutes. Remove. Eat immediately. You can refrigerate the cheese and keep it for up to a week, but it will never be more delicious than it is right now.
Makes 1 pound
BURRATA
One night a decade ago I first tasted burrata, a close cousin of mozzarella, at an Italian restaurant in Berkeley. It was bouncy like mozzarella, but also suave and creamy like … well, it was unlike anything I’d ever eaten before. I looked for it in vain over the next few months and then years, and never stopped thinking about it. Invented in Italy in the early twentieth century, burrata is one of the world’s stranger cheeses. If you watched much television circa 1978, you may remember a brand of gum called Freshen-up in which a tablet of ordinary gum enveloped an inner kernel—a “burst”—of flavored gel. Burrata is the cheese version of Freshen-up. It’s an all-mozzarella dumpling: mozzarella that has been stretched into a skin and then wrapped around a “burst” of more liquid mozzarella curd.
Ten years later, suddenly I cannot escape burrata, or at least what passes for burrata. I went out to dinner one night and there it was on the menu of the trattoria in my suburban town. It arrived on a plate the shape of a long canoe, six small piles of semisolid white curd. This was not quite how I remembered it. It was as if I had ordered a dumpling, but received only filling. In any case, it was delicious—salted, peppered, and served with fresh tomatoes.
The very next day I met my friend Debra for lunch at a café and there it was on the menu again. It arrived on a round plate, a few inert slices of chalk-white cheese. This was not quite how I remembered it. It was as if I had ordered a dumpling, but all that came was the wrapper. I remarked to Debra that I thought the restaurant was passing off ordinary mozzarella as burrata, and Debra said I should complain to the waiter. Debra will politely stop people who have just littered and inform them that they just littered, while I am someone who will watch someone litter and think, Wow, he just littered, that’s weird, why do people litter? I ate the mozzarella, which was delicious—salted, peppered, and served with fresh tomatoes. A few days later, I was shopping at Whole Foods and there it was, burrata again, this time in its proper, bulging dumpling form. I took it home and dissected it, analyzed it, then served