30 Minute Mozarilla

Recently I have been writing a program to allow one player to play Polynesia against an AI opponent. I have not yet gotten very far, but I am making headway. Perhaps I will be able to report amazing success and publish a released version of it some time soon :).  More likely I will report progress updates for a while, and then finally report something that is playable.

Alison periodically tells me that we are going to make more mozzarella (this is supposed to be one of the easiest cheese, but I have only been able to make it successfully one time.) This time we finally realized what we had been doing wrong and made a wonderful mozzarella.

We had been using dry milk for all of our cheese making (which is great because it takes less time to get up to heat, it has no bacteria in it, and it is cheap (which is sad, really, since it takes much more processing)), but this time we used our raw goat milk.

By the time that we were done, it had taken only 40 minutes (from starting with a one gallon brick of milk ice to a beautiful mozzarella . The difference: milkfat. Dry milk has no fat in it and goat milk has more fat than whole milk. The extra fat made for really elastic cheese.

The mozzarella had not done much better than is usual until we started to microwave it (for those who don't know, american mozzarella is microwaved, and made using a fairly non-organic process), but when we microwaved it suddenly it sprang into shape. There were moments of fear after that when we wondered if we had microwaved it too much, but eventually it ended up as a very nice mozzarella.

We grated it over a pizza and it melted amazingly. It tastes nice and creamy. It was stronger than some mozzarella  but still very mild.

Here is the recipe we used.

To finish things up, here are some random recent pictures.