Raindrops on Vegetables and Cheese Making Plans

I took these Saturday morning.

I’m posting them now just so you have something pretty to peruse, and to let you know I’m going to be making mozzarella from goats’ milk today.

It’s something I haven’t done before, but I decided to give it a try thanks to an email from a reader who lives in the Phillipines, where cow’s milk is scarce but goats milk is plentiful. She asked if goats milk was interchangeable with cow’s.

It’s not, at least not in every cheese making recipe. Goats milk is more delicate, slightly more acidic, and easier to digest than cow’s milk.

Anyway, I was intrigued.

So I flipped through Ricki Carroll’s Home Cheese Making (my copy is filled with post-it notes and scribbles and loose notes stuffed in various pages, so flipping through it can result in an avalanche of paper. I should organize. But I’d rather just make the cheese.) and found a recipe for Goat’s Milk Mozzarella. The method is much different from the quick 30-Minute Mozzarella I’ve been making for a few years now, and it also calls for 4 gallons of goat’s milk. Yeah – 4 GALLONS!

Interestingly enough, I actually HAVE 4 gallons of goat’s milk (3 in the freezer and 1 in the fridge) but I don’t have a pot big enough to make the cheese. Well…Bill’s got brew pots that are plenty big enough, but I’d have to use them outside, and we’re supposed to have rain at some point today.