Mozzarella (Mozzarella) is a soft, young cheese from southern Italy. In local cuisine, mozzarella is most often used in pizza, fresh salads, appetizers (caprese), casseroles, lasagna and pasta.

Without this cheese, many Italian dishes and, above all, pizza are unthinkable. It is the mozzarella that has an ideal neutral taste and specific structure, thanks to which the cheese stretches slightly, if you take a ready-made portion of hot pizza. Thanks to the mozzarella, the closed Italian pie Calzone is so delicious, and the caprese's signature Italian snack would simply not be born.

Mozzarella is loved for the fresh and delicate taste of natural milk, featuring a high content of calcium and phosphorus. It is an ideal ingredient for a variety of hot and cold dishes. He will help you to fully unleash your creative abilities in the kitchen!

Release form:

In the box 2 bottles:

1) Mesophilic-thermophilic starter - 1 bottle (weight 0.5 g)

2) Microbial enzyme - 1 bottle (weight 0.15g)

The packaging is designed for making cheese from 10 liters of milk.

The composition of the leaven:  Streptococcus thermophilus.

Shelf life and storage conditions:  Store in original packaging at a temperature from +2 to +8 ° C for 12 months, in a dry place protected from light and inaccessible to children. The contents of the vials should be used immediately.

Cheese sourdoughs VIVO are used to prepare natural cheeses, which have a delicious taste and aroma. Everybody can now make cheese at home with VIVO starters.

Exclusively from the Marina Kamanina School of Cheese Makinghttp://kamanina.net/

Mozzarella history

The first written records of mozzarella can be seen in the culinary book of Bartolomeo Scappi, the famous Italian Renaissance cook. In his book Opera, published in 1570 and including more than 1000 recipes, there is a line: “cream, fresh butter, ricotta cheese, fresh mozzarella and milk”. We must assume that Bartolomeo wrote about mozzarella as an ordinary product of his days, which means that he invented cheese much earlier.

Mozzarella (Mozzarella) is a modified combination of the words of the Neapolitan dialect. Mozza means to cut, and mozzare to cut, which hints at the technological process of production of this cheese.

How to make mozzarella

Milk is fermented with special cheese culture, sometimes rennet is added. After that, the finished mass, similar to clabber, is heated and stirred to separate the serum, which is drained. The resulting elastic mass is kneaded by hand to the state of a stiff dough and cut pieces of the desired size, placing them in a cold brine. By the way, whey, which remains in abundance after the production of mozzarella, goes to the preparation of another famous Italian cheese - ricotta.

Types and forms of mozzarella

Mozzarella is usually found in the form of balls of irregular shape. Bocconcini - large balls the size of an egg, Chilenji - balls the size of a large sweet cherry, pearls - very small. Mozzarella is sometimes sold in the form of a pigtail (tresscha) or large balls 7-10 cm in diameter. Traditionally, mozzarella is sold in a liquid in which balls of cheese float freely. The exception is mozzarella in a pigtail and solid mozzarella with a large ball.

It is believed that mozzarella in a large ball without brine is intended for baking, in fact, any mozzarella can be baked, but in brine the cheese is softer and tastier, and the large and dry cheese is simply lower class, which automatically limits its use.

What to cook with mozzarella

First of all, we recommend cooking cold appetizers and salads with mozzarella. It does not require heating and prepares very quickly. The easiest way to prepare a salad from fresh vegetables and herbs is to add a little mozzarella, olives and season with olive oil with lemon juice and salt. This classic of Mediterranean cuisine is not obsolete with the ages and is very appropriate in the hot season. Be sure to try the caprese salad appetizer: a light snack made from tomato slices, mozzarella pieces and basil leaves, seasoned with olive oil, black pepper and sea salt. Prepares for a minute and can be served for breakfast or with a glass of wine. Do not forget to add slices of fresh wheat bread to the caprese!

Mozzarella is one of the main cheeses used in traditional pizza. Naples, as the birthplace and capital of Italian pizza, is also the main city of the Campania region, where they began to produce mozzarella. It is not clear what was the primary reason - whether pizza rolls always wanted pizza cheese with such wonderful properties, or mozzarella made the usual pizza stuffing in the usual sense, but the fact that mozzarella is perfect for pizza is an indisputable fact.

Try different styles of pizza cooking: put the cheese on top of the sauce, but under the filling to tie all the ingredients together, or put the mozzarella on top of the filling to make the pizza more elegant. Do not forget that mozzarella is an unleavened cheese, and if you do not put salty ingredients, then it is worth a little salt pizza before baking.

With mozzarella make classic Italian closed pie calzone. This cake is a bit like a cheburek, but in general, this is the same pizza, just folded in half. Calzone has a great variety of styles and styles, but mozzarella is used more often than other cheeses in calzone.

With mozzarella sometimes cooked lasagna. Lasagna is a flat sheet of pasta, "pasta paper", arranged in layers with filling (cheese, minced meat, vegetables, mushrooms), filled with sauce and baked in the oven or oven. Here mozzarella plays the role of a link connecting tastes of all components. Extremely satisfying and tasty dishwhich is easy to prepare, has a “corporate” look and is on the menu of many restaurants in the world.

With mozzarella, you can cook casseroles, various vegetable, meat, mushroom dishes "under the cheese", add to the dishes "in pots", to baked or roasted vegetables. Here you need to follow one simple rule: if the cheese is part of the filling or is inside the dish, then you can add it along with the rest of the ingredients, and if the cheese is laid on top, then it should be done 5-10 minutes before the readiness. The fact is that mozzarella melts very quickly, and the prolonged heat dries the cheese and impairs its taste.

Mozzarella Recipes

Caprese

This snack is from the island of Capri. The combination of colors in this dish coincides with the colors of the Italian flag, and caprese is considered the national Italian dish. Ideally, mozzarella should be made of buffalo milk, bull-type tomatoes, and olive oil should not be bitter. Capri is a kind of Mediterranean Eden for the Russian intelligentsia. At various times Leonid Andreev, Ivan Bunin, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Lenin, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Konstantin Paustovsky, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Ivan Turgenev and Pyotr Tchaikovsky lived on Capri. So, Capri’s cuisine is dear to us at least through the spirit of the works of Russian classics.

Ingredients:

Tomatoes,

Basil,
  Olive oil,
  Black pepper, salt.

Cooking:

Lay around the slices of tomato, put a piece of mozzarella on top and cover each slice with a leaf of basil. Sprinkle with olive oil, pepper and salt. Caprese is the perfect snack to light dry wine.

This very tasty and simple Neapolitan pizza, according to legend, was prepared for the first time in honor of the wife of the King of Italy Margarita of Savoy in 1889. The colors of the pizza symbolize the colors of the Italian flag. Margarita was very impressed with the look of the pizza, and since then the pizza from poor food has moved into the category of Italian national pride.

Ingredients:
  Pizza dough,
  Tomato sauce,
  Tomatoes,
  Basil leaves,

Black pepper,
  Salt.

Cooking:
  Roll out a thin pancake from yeast dough. Brush with tomato sauce, put the mugs of tomatoes and scatter the mozzarella on top. Pepper and salt. Bake for 15–20 minutes at 230 degrees or 7–12 minutes at 270 degrees. Decorate the finished pizza with leaves of green basil.

Lasagna are thin pasta layers, folded with a cake-like filling. The filling for lasagna can be anything, but the presence of cheese, sauce and pasta sheets remains unchanged. You can add vegetables with minced meat or finely chopped pieces of chicken, change the composition of vegetables or replace the tomato sauce.

Ingredients:
  Ready sheets for lasagna,
  For bechamel sauce:
  50 g butter,
  50 g flour,
  500 ml of milk.

For filling:
  1-2 zucchini,
  1 onion,
  200 grams of minced meat,
  200 g mozzarella,
  150 g grated Parmesan.

Cooking:
  Cooking bechamel:
  Put warm milk, but do not bring to a boil!
  Melt the butter, add the flour, stirring constantly.
  Add milk to the mixture of butter and flour in small portions, stirring constantly and achieving homogeneity.

At this point, preheat the oven to 180 degrees.

Cooking stuffing:
  Fry the diced onion.
Add the mince and fry for a couple of minutes.
  Add cubed zucchini and fry everything for 5-7 minutes.

We collect lasagna:
  Grease the form with butter.
  Put a small layer of filling, a little bechamel sauce and cover with a paste sheet.
  Again a layer of filling, slices of mozzarella and grated parmesan, a little sauce. Cover with a sheet of pasta.
  Another layer of toppings, sauce, mozzarella and parmesan. And again a sheet of pasta.
  Top with the remaining cheese and sprinkle with the remaining Parmesan cheese. Pour the rest of the sauce along the edges.
  Bake 35-40 minutes at 180 degrees.

Lasagna goes well with wine, it is a dense and tasty dish.

Mozzarella goes well with many products, it is a versatile cheese, well suited for cold appetizers, salads, pizza and casseroles.

To make mozzarella cheese, we need:

• 0.5 teaspoons citric acid per liter of milk
• 250 ml of cold boiled water, preferably from under the filter, because chlorine "kills" the enzyme. Distilled water is also suitable.
• 2 liters of rustic milk
• Kitchen thermometer
• Miscellaneous Kitchenware
• Enzyme for souring milk.

One bag of enzyme is enough for fermenting 100 liters of milk! Therefore, for 2 liters of milk you need only 2/100 sachets. To accurately measure out, we dilute the whole bag in 50 ml of cold water and take a 2 ml enzyme with a two-vat syringe.

Now the most important thing!

Milk must be rustic "raw", not boiled and preferably not pasteurized. If pasteurized, then at a temperature of 60 degrees - 30 minutes.

If you do not adhere to this advice, the cheese will turn out not so tasty and it will not stretch when heated.

The process of making cheese:

1. Citric acid is needed to lower the pH of milk, so that the cheese lasts when heated. First you need to dilute citric acid in water (125 ml).

2. Then in a cold milk (not higher than 17 degrees) carefully and slowly pour the citric acid solution, constantly stirring the milk. If you pour citric acid into warm milk, it may roll up, but we do not need it.

4. Heat the milk to a temperature of 32 degrees.

5. Pour diluted enzyme into it.

6. Stir the whole thing for at least 2-3 minutes.

7. You can add calcium chloride to the milk (sold in ampoules in a pharmacy) and mix well too. Calcium chloride is needed to increase the finished product (about 5%), but it can be done without it.

8. Cover the saucepan with the lid and do not touch the milk for about 30-40 minutes.

9. A clot should form. The formation of a clot can be checked with a clean finger - the milk should not remain on the finger. If the milk remains on the finger, wait for more ...

11. We heat this mixture to 42-43 degrees, constantly stirring and try to make the pieces of cheese (this is cheese) not stick together. It is better, of course, to heat up in a water bath, but it is also possible on the stove.

13. Slightly press down the curd and drain the whey. Strong pressure is not necessary.

14. Take out the cheese mass from the colander and put in a plate. The consistency is similar to dough.

15. Approximately 1/3 of the whey is poured into a container and salt is added there. You need to salt, whoever he likes, the recommendation - a tablespoon of salt with a slide, mix. It turns out the salt concentration is more than 2%.

17. Separate the required piece of curd and dispose of it in hot whey.

18. Shumovka cheese constantly stir (about 15 seconds) and we get it and begin to stretch, the cheese should not break, if it is torn, it is necessary to warm the cheese in whey and knead it. To avoid getting burned, you can use a silicone glove.

Mozzarella Cheese  - typical cheese of the family " Pasta filata"(Soft cheese with an elongated clot). It has a different shape: round, oval or ovoid, weight from 50 to 500 g. Production methods are different, depending on market conditions. Cheese clot mozzarella  often obtained using abomasum rather than acid precipitation.

Crust:  Missing. This is a soft, porous cheese mass in the shell.
  Cheese dough: White, soft.
  Structure: Soft, supple, moist, with the typical structure of an elongated cheese. No eyes.
Taste and aroma:  Fresh, pleasant slightly salty and sourish taste. Buffalo cheese is more piquant and fragrant than cow milk cheese.
Milk:  Buffalo, cow's milk or a mixture thereof. Usually use fresh milk, carefully cleaned from impurities.
Heat treatment:  In a row of cases is not performed. Heat treatment temperature - 65.6-75 ° С.
Additives:  3 g of calcium chloride and 10 g of sodium nitrate per 100 liters of milk.
Leaven:  0.05-0.5% of thermophilic starter cultures of Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus delbreuckii subsp. bulgaricus at a temperature of 31-32 ° C. Leave to increase the acidity of 0.02%.
Abomasum:  Bring in 1 gram rennet CHY-MAX Extra® per 100 liters of milk at a temperature of 31-32 ° C (sometimes at 35 ° C). The clot should become dense and ready for cutting in 25-45 minutes, however, for colder milk, the ripening period can be 75 minutes. The clot should break apart evenly.
Bunch cutting:  The clot is cut into particles of 1-1.5 cm in size (the size of a walnut). Then knead for 5 minutes for drying the curd, after which the grain is precipitated for 30 minutes. Leave the cheese mass in a warm condition for 3-4 hours (summer) and up to 8 hours (winter) (some manufacturers heat the serum to 40 ° C and pour it back into the cheese mass) so that its acidity reaches the desired level.
Serum removal:  Serum is slowly separated; pressed cheese mass to form a layer. Slice the curd into blocks of 20 cm. Wash in cold water and leave to drain.
Maturation:  The blocks are placed in serpyanka and transferred to a cool room with a temperature of 4-5 ° C. For sour cheese, it may be necessary to cover the cheese mass with crushed ice.
  Melting and extrusion: Check the curd dough for stretchability. Place a portion of the curd in hot water (82 ° C). At the desired level of acidity (pH 5.1-5.4), the hot curd mass should be drawn up to 1 m in length. The cheese mass is extracted from serpyanka and cut into smaller pieces, which are immersed in hot water so that it completely covers them. The temperature in the mixer should be 70-82 ° C. Leave the cheese mass for some time to heat, and then knead until a plastic uniform state. Do not heat the mass to a temperature above 57 ° C.
Molding:  Hot plastic cheese mass is spread in rigid forms of stainless steel and give it the desired shape. Cool rapidly in cold water and leave it for 1 h.
Salting:  0.75% salt is added to the plastic cheese mass. It is also possible to use the cooling stage for salting by immersing cold cheese in a 16-20% brine with a temperature of 8-10 ° C for a sufficient time (from 5 minutes to 24 hours) to achieve a salt concentration in the cheese equal to 1.6%. The duration of the aging in brine depends on the concentration of the brine and the size of the cheese. After salting in brine, the cheese is dried for an hour.
Maturation:  Usually cheese is eaten fresh, but sometimes it is stored at a temperature of 4 ° C for some time.
Packing:  Cheese is often sealed in a film of polyvinylidene chloride or in laminated bags.

What can you say about such a beautiful, tasty and healthy product like mozzarella cheese? You can add poetry, write odes and each such work will be a masterpiece, since each person individually perceives all the charming qualities of this cheese and finds for him the widest range of applications from classic to new, sometimes seemingly exotic and incompatible at first glance, dishes.

We will not consider the production of Mozzarella from buffalo milk, there are few of them all over the world, and in Russia there are none at all, but we will consider the issue of making this wonderful cheese from cow’s milk, which does not detract from its merits, especially since 99% of this cheese is made from this milk.

As is well known, Mozzarella cheese is produced according to classic Italian recipes, where Carlina 1650 rennet or its microbial analogue Marzyme 150 MG enzyme is used, and LYO special starter - lyophilized thermophilic starter direct addition (Choozit TM 81 LYO from Danisco, also Bulgarian rod) . Additionally, you can add an additional aromatic starter Choozit LH 100 LYO, which gives the cheese a bright cheese aroma and taste and gives the grain additional plasticity. If you are making goat cheese, we recommend adding to the recipe a slightly thermophilic high-viscosity ferment Choozit TA 45 (40) LYO

Terms used:

DCU - units of the starter activity, the amount of the starter per 100 liters of milk.

IMCU is a unit of enzyme activity per 100 liters of milk, the amount of enzyme per 100 liters of milk.

Production technology of Mozzarella cheese.

Technological process	Description
Pasteurization	Heating the milk to a temperature of 72 ° C for 15 seconds. Preferably not direct heating of the milk on an open fire.
Milk cooling	To a temperature of 37-38 ° С
The introduction of bacterial starter Choozit TM 81 LYO (Thermophilic non-viscous cultures Str. Thermophilus, Lactobacillus bulgaricus)	Recommended dosage 5 DCU per 100 liters of milk. The required amount of starter to make the milk, wait 5 minutes and mix thoroughly for 10-15 minutes, excluding milk foaming. Soak the milk at the set temperature for about 90 minutes. Download ferment descriptionChoozit TM 81 LYO.
The introduction of the enzyme Carlina   1650 (rennet) orMarzyme 150 MG (microbial)	Prepare the enzyme Carlina 1650 or Marzyme 150 MG , dissolving it in non-chlorinated water in accordance with the manufacturer's instructions (download descriptions of the enzymes Carlina 1650  or Marzyme 150 MG). Approximate dosages of enzymes are 2900-5200IMCU per 100 liters of milk. The amount to be injected should be sufficient to form a clot within about 30-45 minutes. Bring the enzyme in and mix alternately for 1 minute from the bottom up and vice versa.
Coagulation	For about 30-45 minutes at a temperature of 37-38 ° C.
Clot cutting	Within about 15 minutes, cut the clot into cubes with a side of 2.5 cm in different directions with a dwell between cutting 5 minutes.
Grain Dehydration	For about 10 minutes.
Second heating	For about 5 minutes to a temperature of 41 ° C with gentle stirring, do not allow a sharp increase in temperature.
Further grain dehydration	About 10 minutes
Grain aging	On the table or in a bath under a layer of serum to achieve a pH of 5.3.
Heat treatment to give plasticity and the formation of balls	At a temperature not exceeding 85 ° C, constantly pulling out and checking for viscosity. The cheese should be drawn evenly, with a shiny and smooth surface. Do not overdry the cheese, do not lose the softness and taste of the cheese, because the longer you pull the cheese, the drier and harder it becomes. After the cheese is stretched, proceed to the formation of balls or "pigtails". Form the balls, pulling the cheese on top and turning the edges inward.
Cooling	After that we send the cheese for cooling in cold saline solution on whey or cold water. The pH of the finished product is 5.2-5.4.

Sourdough Choozit TM 81 LYO

Rennet Carlina 1650

Microbial enzyme Marzyme 150 MG

P.S. Do not pour out the serum - make from it the most delicate delicacy: Ricotta cheese with sourdough Choozit TM 81 LYO.

As usual, we repeat the main commandments of the cheesemaker:

• do not use pasteurized milk. Milk needs to pick high-quality, high-protein, fat, and dry matter;
• strictly observe the requirements of hygiene and sanitation, from personal hygiene to the cleanliness of equipment, containers, premises and ingredients;
• the use of proven starters, namely LYO starters from Danisco company, a pledge of high quality. Remember that these starters suppress, among other things, the development of undesirable microorganisms.

Enjoy your meal!