This is one of my all time greatest desserts. Creamy, buttery wedges of polenta are topped with freshly whipped cream and vincotto. After you mix it around on your plate and get a bit of everything in a mouthful, it is heaven.
Polenta With Vincotto Recipe
1 Cup polenta
1 Tbsp butter
2 Cups milk
2 Cups water
1/2 Tsp of fresh grated nutmeg
1 Tbsp sugar (optional)
Vincotto & whipped cream to serve
*When I’m feeling lazy I microwave my polenta – it isn’t traditional but it beats stirring for ages when you just want to eat! The traditional way is to simmer the polenta, nutmeg, milk, water, butter and sugar over a low heat while stirring regularly for about 20 minuts, until thick and smooth. Otherwise:
In a large microwave safe bowl with a lid or covering, stir together the water, sugar, milk, butter, nutmeg and polenta. Microwave on high for 4 minutes. Remove carefully (wear oven mitts!), open the lid (carefully, the steam is very hot) and stir well to break up lumps. Return and microwave for another 3 minutes, remove and check for done-ness. There shouldn’t be any obvious hard grains – you want it smooth and creamy. Give it another minute at a time if it needs it.
Pour the polenta mixture into a small cake or loaf pan that has a piece of baking paper cut to fit on its bottom. Use a spoon to smooth the top and press it down evenly. Let the polenta set – this might take an hour, a bit less in the fridge.
To serve, turn out the set polenta and cut into wedges or slices. Put a wedge on each plate and spoon or pipe over whipped cream. Just before serving give it a healthy drizzle of vincotto.
Every winemaking season we put aside a few buckets of grapes to make delicous syrupy vincotto – also called vinicotto or vino cotto. Although vincotto translates as “cooked wine” the version I’m familiar with isn’t alcoholic – just a sweet reduction of fruit juice. We make a big batch using freshly pressed grapes but we have also experimented with bought, bottled grape juice and found that it works well. I recommend that if you use bought juice, you look for a preservative free one or else you will be concentrating the preservative too. Just 100% dark grape juice. Organic juices seem to give cleaner flavours than the cheaper stuff in plastic bottles but experiment with different brands to see what works best.
To make vincotto all you do is simmer grape juice over a low heat for several hours, until it is reduced to a syrupy liquid. Then bottle in clean bottles and store – it keeps well and improves with age. We found a seller at a farmers market with vincotto that had been aged on oak and tried this ourselves. The oak adds another layer of flavour that is pretty interesting, so I recommend trying it out. You don’t need a barrel, just get some oak chips used for winemaking from any homebrew store or from Amazon here. Tie the oak chips in the end of a stocking or a scrap of muslin. Put this in a big jar, and fill it with vincotto. I’d use about 1tbsp of oak chips per 1 liter/2 pints, and give it a stir every week or so to distribute the flavour. Taste it often and take out the oak when it tastes right.
This batch was made of Pinot Noir grapes so my mum called it Pinot Cotto. Ha ha.
How To Use Vincotto
Use vincotto anywhere you’d use maple syrup or similar sweet dressings. We eat it drizzled over pancakes or buttered crumpets, or with icecream and stewed fruit. You can use a dash of it in any savoury dish that needs a little sweetening for balance too – sometimes I’ll add 1/2 tsp to a rich pasta sauce or meat stew. My personal favourite though is polenta wedges with cream and vincotto. This would be part of my last meal – the intense sweet/tart/caramel flavour of vincotto powers through soft buttery polenta with cool whipped cream to contrast – I’ll write up the recipe tomorrow!
First off I have to give credit to the incomparable FXCuisine, where I got this recipe for Pasta Alla Norma. If you haven’t seen his site, check it out.
Pasta Alla Norma is a Sicilian dish, simple to make but deliciously rewarding. It is made up of good pasta – usually larger shapes like penne -topped with a simple tomato sauce, ricotta salata, basil and fried eggplant (aubergine). I made this when I wanted to offer a good dinner to guests but I was in a hurry that day as this is so simple to make – I made the sauce the day before to save time.If you can find a bronze die pasta it will have a better texture for the sauce to stick to, but don’t sweat it too much!
Ricotta salata is a salted and aged version of ricotta. I couldn’t find any at short notice so I used normal ricotta and while the dish was good, I thought it needed an extra kick that the ricottta salata would have provided. I added some fresh grated parmesan and I recommend using that or pecorino with your ricotta if you can’t find ricotta salata either. I’ve also seen versions of this recipe calling for capers which would have the same effect – you want a punchy, salty ingredient to go with the smooth flavours of eggplant. Serious Eats suggest trying a saltier cheese like sheeps milk fetta as another option. I took this advice for my second attempt at the dish and it was excellent – I mixed equal parts creamy fetta and ricotta, then used that in place of ricotta salata.
The dish is best with a simple but tasty tomato sauce, something like a good can or 2 of tomatoes blended up (I use my own preserved tomato sauce) and simmered with some tomato concentrate, garlic, salt and pepper and herbs. I think at a pinch you could use a good jar of simple tomato passata from a store, with a bit of salt and pepper.
Ingredients
2 Eggplants (aubergines), firm/young ones if possible, diced/sliced
500g / 1lb good quality pasta – penne, macaroni or other larger shapes
4-5 Cloves of garlic
3 Tbsp olive oil
About 2 cups of pasta sauce of your choice (see above)
250g / 1/2lb Fresh ricotta or ricotta salata or ricotta mixed with fetta (see above)
Fresh grated parmesan or pecorino to serve
1 Small bunch of basil
Method
Prepare or heat up the pasta sauce.
Fill a large saucepan nearly to the top with hot water and put it on the stove, high heat. Stir in 1/2 tbsp salt. Put the lid on while it comes to a boil.
Crush and dice the garlic. Add to a large frying pan with the olive oil over medium-low heat, and cook stirring occasionally until the garlic is just golden brown. Remove and discard the garlic (the flavour is now in the oil).
Add the eggplant to the frying pan and cook, stirring and turning until it is all nicely browned. Keep the heat fairly low, you want it to cook through and get golden brown on the outside without burning. This step might take 10-15 minutes.
While the eggplant cooks and as soon as the pot of water is boiling vigorously tip in the dried pasta and stir well. After 8 mins or so start tasting a piece now and then for done-ness. Cook until done how you like it – not so long that it starts to get very soft and lose its shape. When cooked, ladle the pasta out into a strainer using a slotted spoon and set aside.
To assemble the dish, ladle some pasta into each bowl, then top with a good splash of pasta sauce. Crumble over the ricotta and parmesan/pecorino. Use kitchen scissors to snip little bits off the bunch of basil, adding around 1 tbsp to each bowl. Finally, top with the cooked eggplant.
When eating, you stir the ingredients through so you get a bit of everything in each mouthful – the different flavour combinations are mouth watering.
Here’s an update – my second attempt at the dish, using a mixture of fetta and ricotta for the cheese.
The end of summer is a delicious time. The last month or two we have had tons of zucchinis, eggplant, onions, apples, peaches and more but just maybe the most delicious – beautiful tomatoes. We eat as many as we can and bottle the rest as sauce. I can’t recommend this enough – if you can start with good, ripe tomatoes and make a simple sauce the difference between home made and bought sauces is mind blowing.
If you’re growing your own tomatoes it makes sense to save up as many as possible and do one big sauce making session. This usually means picking as they ripen and storing in the fridge for a few days while stocks slowly build up. When we haven’t grown our own some years we have bought a few boxes from farmers markets or grocers.
The best way we’ve found to make a simple sauce is to simmer the tomatoes in big pots until just soft, then let them sit in a colander for a minute to drain. Or you could try the approach of roasting your tomatoes first – this does look pretty tasty I admit! After cooking, use a tomato mill like the one I reviewed here last year or a mouli (vegetable mill) to get the skin and seeds out. You can jar them at this point but you’ll probably end up with quite a runny sauce, which will separate in the jars. This isn’t such a bad thing but this year we took our sauce and simmered it over low heat for a few hours, until reduced in volume by about a quarter. The taste of this reduced sauce… I’m drooling again thinking about it.
There are lots of different styles of jars for preserving or ‘canning’ vegetables. Although expensive new, we have found many crates of them at garage sales and op shops for a fraction of the price – just make sure you can still get the rings and lids for whichever ones you get. We use Fowlers brand jars as the parts are available new if you need them. To use these jars you fill to about an inch from the top, and slip over a rubber seal, the lid and a clip to hold it down. Before we got jars we used long neck beer bottles with crown caps from a homebrew store, and you can save and reuse any jars or bottles as long as they have good metal lids.
When full put all of your jars in a big stock pot and add water to just below the lids and slowly bring to a low boil. I boil the jars for an hour, then let them cool slowly in the hot water to be on the safe side.
Here’s how the seal should sit on the jar – these are a bit fiddly to get on but you soon get the hang of flicking the twists with your thumb to straighten them up.
If you have a dedicated ‘Vacola’ pot for boiling the jars, it has a raised platform in the bottom so that the jars aren’t right on the hot bottom of the pot. If you’re using a stock pot, bring to the heat slowly or the jars can crack – either from the heat or bubbles jittering them around. I’ve seen people put rags or tea towels on the bottom to stop this happening.
Another batch of sauce ready to boil.
If you’ve been making sauce all day and need a quick meal, take a ladle full of your fresh sauce, grind in a little salt and pepper, cook up whatever pasta you have lying around – thick shapes like spirals work well but anything goes and hit it with the sauce. Grate a little parmesan on top if you have it. Might not look like much but the clean flavours and textures are so good.
More:
Mouli on Amazon (or try second hand shops) – this is a good, cheap option for making smaller batches of sauce.
Leading up to this years wine season, I’ve been reading a lot about ‘natural wines’ – eg wines produced with as little intervention as possible. This usually means no yeast added, no acid added and no or minimal sulfur used. By extension techniques like micro-oxygenation, use of tannin extracts, reverse osmosis and many other things done in modern commercial winemaking would be ruled out. I think an advocate would say that taking this approach is the way to get the clearest expression of the character of the grape. This is a romantic idea, and one I agree with to some extent. It is nice to think that you could pick grapes, let them sit for a while, and end up with wine produced so naturally that it’s almost as if it just dropped from the vine into the bottle, with a character that expresses something about where and when and how it was grown.
400kg makes enough wine for the extended family for another year
On the other hand there are many good reasons that commercial wineries do the things they do. Adding a little acid to lower the wine pH stops bacteria from producing various foul tastes. Sulfur, in the form of metabisulphate, is used to stop the wine oxidising and also to reduce bacterial growth. Selected strains of wine yeast are added so that the fermentation completes and the wine doesn’t end up tasting too sweet. As much as it may be possible to create amazing wines with nothing more than grapes, I have tasted, made and heard of foul tasting bottles of syrupy vinegary horse blanket juice.
After fermentation, pressing with my little press
I picked up a Kindle copy of Naked Wine – Letting Grapes Do What Comes Naturally by Alice Feiring, which is a good read no matter which side of the fence you’re on regarding natural winemaking. Although she is very pro-nature, one message I took from that book was that anything you do should be justified, required vs done out of habit. Scientific methods shouldn’t be ruled out any more than natural methods – whatever will let you achieve your goal for your wine is what you should do.
Grapes, squished dry
This year I decided to take this approach, with intervention only where I really thought it was needed. For me this meant:
No sulfur at crush – a nerve wracking change but one I hoped would yet wild yeasts add to the flavour profile of the wine.
Only a tiny amount of commercial yeast – a pinch – was added to make sure there was some yeast capable of finishing the fermentation.
A small amount of acid added to reduce the pH to a safe range without adding so much it was obvious in the flavour
Minimal amount of sulfur added when the primary fermentation was added, to prevent bacteria turning the wine to vinegar as it ages.
Minimal amount of sulfur will be added at bottling.
No filtering or fining.
I should add that if you are taking this approach I think you should be tasting and smelling your wine at least once a day so you can spot any problems early on and do something about them. I’m happy to say my wine is going well so far – I just pressed it today after 2 weeks on the skins and it tastes, fruity, complex and delicious with a hint of butter in the mouth feel.
2 seemingly unrelated facts led me to try out a new recipe today.
1: I think beans can be among the most delicious of all foods – rich, creamy, satisfying and healthy.
2: I need work lunches!
Since I often fall back on tinned baked beans I decided to try making my own. In an old family cookbook I have a recipe for ‘Mrs Abbenantes Baked Beans’ that I loosely based this on.
Ingredients
2 cups dried Haricot beans (you could substitute other white dried beans or a few tins of already cooked beans if in a hurry).
2 rashers smoky bacon
2 carrots
1 onion
3 cloves garlic
1 capsicum (pepper)
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp dried oregano
1 bay leaf
1 tsp honey
1 tsp salt
2 tins diced tomatoes
2 fresh ripe tomatoes (optional – but it adds a little zing)
1/2 cup red wine
olive oil
Method
Unless using tinned beans, soak the beans overnight in plenty of water. Then drain the water, and put the soaked beans in another pan with enough fresh water to cover them well (water as deep above the beans as the width of your hand or so). Bring to a boil, then simmer for 1-2 hours. After an hour, start tasting the beans now and then to see if they are done – they should be soft, but not falling apart. Try not to stir too much while they cook to avoid breaking them up. When done, drain and set aside.
Dice the capsicum (pepper), bacon, onion and carrot medium fine. Mash and dice the garlic. Over medium heat, saute in a saucepan with a glug of olive oil until starting to soften and brown – 5-10 minutes.
Add the wine, bay leaf and other spices (and diced fresh tomato if using). Stir for another minute or so.
Add the tinned tomatoes, cooked beans and honey along with 4 cups of water. Put the lid on the pan and simmer on fairly low heat for about an hour, stirring now and then. If the mixture dries out too fast add a little more water.
After an hour remove the lid and continue to simmer until the mixture is as thick as you like, stirring often. Remove the bay leaf and season to taste with more salt if needed.
I ate mine with a drizzle of good olive oil, grated parmesan and black pepper – delicious. The plan is to freeze portions for work lunches – but we will see how much is left over as I just went back for seconds…
We had a great lamb pizza recently and I was inspired to try making a version at home. It came out pretty well – definitely one I’ll make again! There’s a lot of scope to use different ingredients on this pizza, I think spinach or avocado would both work well. Lamb has quite a strong flavour, so it works well with other assertive ingredients. Yoghurt is a classic pairing adding some contrast to the roast capsicum too, but it is optional if you aren’t such a fan.
Ingredients were sourced from a local farmers market, with the lamb produced by Wattle Wood Springs.
*These quantities are enough to top 2 x 12″/30cm pizzas
Prepare the dough in advance according to your chosen recipe. Preheat a pizza stone if using.
Mix half the garlic with the yoghurt. Mix well and set aside until needed.
Lightly toast the cumin seeds in a small pan. This is easy to overdo, so remove from the heat as soon as they start to smell toasty. When toasted, whiz in a spice blender. As an alternative, just use cumin powder.
Make a marinade for the lamb using 1/2 the garlic, a pinch of salt, the cumin and the lemon juice. Marinate the lamb for at least an hour.
To roast a pepper/capsicum, place under the grill/broiler until the skin blackens, turning until cooked all around. Allow to cool and peel off the skin. As an alternative, you can purchase pre-roasted. Cut into strips.
Remove the lamb from its marinade and cut into strips, as thin as possible.
Shape the pizza dough. Hit it with a splash of sauce, then scatter over a little paprika. Sprinkle over 1/4 of the Mozzarella.
Arrange the onion and red pepper, then the lamb and finish with another 1/4 of the Mozz.
Cook on a preheated pizza stone or tray, in as hot as oven as possible for around 5-6 minutes or until browned and delish!
Before serving, drizzle with the garlic yoghurt to taste.
In December, my family was invited to an Italian wedding anniversary party – a great night, with course after course of wonderful food and a round of coffee to finish the night off. But this coffee wasn’t like anything I had tried before – it was served as shots in double walled glasses, black and syrupy with a brown foam on top, and tasted just like drinking a liquid coffee bean. I knew then I had to learn to make the same thing at home. I knew I needed an espresso machine, so I gave the wife fair warning to expect new gadgets, and started shopping.
After a bit of research, I discovered the Mypressi Twist. This is a handheld device for making true espresso coffee. It uses small gas cartridges (used for soda water and whipped cream and available anywhere) to force hot water through ground coffee at high pressure. The resulting ‘shots’ of espreso can be drunk as-is, or added to hot water and/or milk to produce any kind of coffee.
The Mypressi Twist
It is straight forward to use. You twist the water chamber off the handle, and pour in some boiling water to preheat the device (this is important as the temperature of the water used makes a big change to the flavour of the coffee). You take some ground coffee and tamp it down in the basket. Then empty the water chamber, drop the basket into the handle, screw the chamber on top and pour in some more boiling water. Fasten the lid, hold down the trigger, and in 20-30 seconds you have your coffee!
So how does it perform? I’d have to say it is pretty good. Milk based drinks are always delicious, and my wife can’t go without her morning (and afternoon) cappucino now or else I’ll hear about it. I have been drinking a couple of espressos per day and they are mostly very good. A slight drawback is that it is a little harder to get temperature consistency between shots unless you very carefully time how long you preheat etc. Some of my shots are certainly better than others and I think temperature plays a part. It seems like the hotter the better for espresso, and sometimes I will do the preheat-with-boiling-water step twice, boiling the kettle fresh each time I refill it.
You’ll need some way of frothing milk if you want cappucino style drinks, but there’s a couple of good ways of doing it. A lot of people use a small coffee plunger/french press, plunging the plunger up and down until the milk froths up. I usually use one of the small battery powered frothing wands, which works well too. Neithermethod is as good as steamed milk from a bigger machine with a boiler though.
The Mypressi - coffee basket, water reservoir and handle
Included in the box are standard, pod and pressurised baskets and an attachment with 2 spouts. The water reservoir holds enough to make 2 single shots, and the double spouts pour quite evenly into 2 cups at once. The pressurised basket is for preground coffee or coffee that isn’t ground properly fine enough for espresso – if this is the case, water flows through the standard basket too fast no matter how hard you tamp. Real coffee snobs seem to frown on the pressurised basket but it works well enough for me – my grinder doesn’t quite grind fine enough to use the standard basket. Note that you will need a decent burr grinder to get the best out of this or any espresso machine, and a decent powered model starts around the $300 mark. A cheaper alternative that seems to get good reviews is the Kyocera hand grinder – I’m thinking about getting one of these myself.
Conclusion
After using the MyPressi 3-4 times a day for a month now I strongly recommend it as a budget alternative to an espresso machine. It makes a great cup of coffee and the unit itself is well made and stylish, and very portable. I think I will still get a bigger machine one day so I can steam my milk, make espresso at a consistent temperature and make coffees more quickly for entertaining. But when I do, the twist will become a nice upgrade for my office plunger. Paired up with the Kyocera grinder I think this would make an amazing tool for camping or travel too.
Sources:
I’m in Australia and had to go to a local specialty coffee store, Simply Coffee to find one of these for $200, which was $50 less than the best price I could find on ebay.
In the US, try ebay and Amazon. They seem to go for USD$150 plus shipping on ebay, or you can find them here on Amazon for the same price but with an offer of free shipping.
Olive oil is an important part of Italian cooking, at least for some regions – that spicy, peppery taste gives an extra dimension to anything it touches. I’ve always wanted to make my own oil but my olive tree is still too small and experiments with wild roadside olives have produced mixed results. This year I got lucky though – my uncle has an untended olive grove on his property and invited the family to come pick some before the emus got them!
Picking olives by hand takes a while, but there is a trick to doing it efficiently. We spread large pieces of shade cloth and tarpaulins on the ground, and then attacked the trees with olive rakes – small handheld plastic rakes that slip easily over leaves and branches but catch the fruit. When each tree was bare, we carefully gathered up the shade cloth and tipped olives into waiting buckets. The olives go to a local plant for pressing. Olives can yield around 10-15% of their weight in oil; I’d be very happy if my share is 20 litres.
Using an olive rakeCollecting the olives
My uncle also has a stand of plump Kalamata olives, so I picked some for curing. Preserving olives isn’t too hard but there a lot of variations – some recipes use lye, some dry salt, some brine and some fresh water. I don’t love the idea of using lye (sodium hydroxide) and in the past my fresh water cured olives have tended to go off more easily, so this year I tried wet and dry salt curing. If they taste as good as I hope these will end up on pizza in tapenade, salads and foccacia among many other uses!
Kalamata olives for curing
Brined olives
Rinse olives, discarding any soft or shrivelled ones. Fill a clean jar or crock pot with the olives.
Make up brine with 5% cooking salt by volume –half a cup of salt in 10 cups of water. Pour this brine over the olives until covered.
Olives need to stay completely submerged while curing so that mould doesn’t get a chance to grow above the level of brine. A helpful trick I picked up a while ago is to place a loose piece of cling wrap over the vessel, press it down to the surface, then pour a little more brine on top.
Change this brine every day or two, until the olives are no longer bitter – this might take a few weeks. Taste regularly after the first week so you know when they are done.
Finishing brine
Once the initial curing is complete, the olives are marinated in a finishing brine mixture. This mixture helps preserve the olives and can also add other ingredients for flavour. I use one third of a cup of salt to 5 cups of water and 2 cups of red wine vinegar. Other common ingredients are bay leaves, rosemary, garlic, oregano, chilli or basil – add any of these to your own taste. Fill clean jards with the olives, top up with finishing brine and then add a layer of olive oil which will float on top of the jar and prevent air contact. Olives preserved in this way should last for up to a year in the fridge, but will likely be eaten long before that!
Dry cured olives
Half fill a large jar or crock pot with olives. Pour over coarse sea salt until the olives are covered.
Every day, carefully tip out any liquid that has collected in the bottom of the vessel. Taste the olives every week or so until they no longer taste bitter, then preserve with finishing brine as above.
Making your own Mozzarella might seem like overkill, but it is surprisingly easy to do with great results! You will need a few tools and ingredients but nothing too complicated, and the smooth, creamy taste and texture of fresh homemade Mozzarella on your pizzas will have you hooked – I recommend making a double or triple batch and freezing some for later.
Note: The first step of making mozzarella is to acidify the milk. This method uses food acid to speed up the process, but if you prefer you can use a little yoghurt instead of the food acid. If using yoghurt, you would add it to the milk and allow it to sit overnight until fermented.
Tools and Ingredients
pH tester
I’m using a digital pH meter but if you don’t want to spring for a meter, pH strips will do the job just fine, but get some like these – they are more accurate than the type with just one or two colour squares. To be honest, you can probably skip the pH testing completely if you aren’t scientifically minded or don’t mind taking a chance. I don’t like my cheese to be more acidic than necessary as I feel that it affects the taste, so I do check the pH of the milk while adding acid and stop as soon as I’ve reached my target.
Tartaric Acid
In the past, I have followed recipes that called for citric acid. I have decided to use tartaric acid as I found that the citric acid left a slightly more pronounced bitterness in the finished cheese. You can substitute the tartaric for citric acid if necessary or preferred though.
Rennet
Being a little squeamish, I use this non-animal rennet and have not had any problems with it. If you prefer, traditional rennet is just fine too.
Milk
It’s important to use non homogenised milk to make mozzarella – homogenised milk does not work well if at all. Interestingly though, it is possible to use milk powder. I’ve done it, and while the cheese wasn’t as good as with fresh milk, it was better than not having any Mozzarella at all. Source your milk from a local dairy if possible, the taste of the finished cheese will reflect the quality of the milk you use.
Thermometer
You will need an accurate probe thermometer. I use an analogue one out of habit but I also have a digital version that is more accurate.
Mozzarella Recipe
Makes around 400g/1lb
Milk
4 litres
4 pints
Tartaric Acid
7g
1 level tsp
Rennet
Per instructions
Salt
6g
1 tsp
Pour the milk into a large saucepan or stock pot. Dissolve the tartaric acid in half a cup of water, then add to the milk. If using a pH tester, make up more acid solution than needed and add a tablespoon at a time while stirring well, until the milk reaches pH 5.6.
Checking pH with a meter
Heat the milk to 32C/90F. I find the best way to do this is to put it over the lowest heat possible while stirring, and monitor the temperature. If it isn’t warm enough after 10 minutes or so, increase the heat slightly and continue to monitor. Once at 32C/90F, turn off the heat.
Check the instructions for your chosen rennet and add the appropriate amount. With the one I used, I added 5 drops per litre of milk to a tablespoon of water, which was then stirred into the milk.
Cover the pan and leave to sit for several hours. You are looking for the milk to set to the point that the curd breaks cleanly when pressed or cut.
Clean break, the curd is ready to cut
Cut the curd into cubes about 1cm (½ inch) apart.
Cutting the curd
Return the pan to the heat, and slowly increase the heat to 105C. Leave at this temperature for half an hour, stirring occasionally.
Line a colander or large sieve with cheesecloth. My guilty secret is that I never have cheesecloth handy in my kitchen – I use a clean tea towel. Don’t tell my missus! Pour the curds and whey into your lined sieve, and allow the whey to drain out for 10 minutes. Turning over the curds halfway through lets a little more whey drain out, but there’s no need to squeeze or press them. TIP: save the whey and you can make ricotta later!
Straining the curd
Tip your strained curds into a mixing bowl, and add the salt. Work it through, breaking up the curd as you mix.
At this point you will have salted curd, ready to be stretched!
Stretching Mozzarella
Before it can be stretched, the curd needs to be melted. I have seen two different methods of doing this. One is to take one cup of curd at a time and microwave it for 45 seconds. The other is to tip the curd into a large bowl of hot water. Both have the potential to cause owies, but I think the hot water method is safer as the microwave can sometimes heat things more quickly and hotter than you might realise, which makes the curd dangerous to handle.
For the hot water method, boil a pan full of water, remove from the heat, and let it cool slightly. 70C/160F is enough to melt curd for stretching, but if it is a little hotter you won’t have to work so fast before it cools too much. Tip the curd into the hot water. Use tongs or a slotted spoon to pull out some curd ready to shape. It will be hot, so keep a bowl or sink full of cool water handy to dip your fingers into. If it’s too hot to handle, wear rubber gloves.
Stretch the curd out and fold it over itself a few times. You will see it start to look shiny as you work it.
Stretching the curd
Shape it into a ball by making a ring with your thumb and forefinger and holding the piece in between. Continuously tuck the curd up inside itself until you have a neat ball, Squeeze your thumb and forefinger together to seal the end. You can shape either big or small balls as desired. When shaped, drop each ball into a bowl of cold salt water – I use 1 tbsp per litre of water.
Shaping the balls
Finished! You can store your mozzarella balls in the salt water, or remove them when cool and store in a bowl or bag. For pizza use it’s probably more sensible to store dry, to avoid soggy bases. Fresh mozzarella should keep for a few days in the fridge, or longer frozen.
To Make Ricotta
Boil the strained whey vigorously for a few minutes. Pour into a cheesecloth lined sieve. Tie the ends of the cloth with string and hang from something overnight.
