I make pizza, it’s my current thing. When it comes to food I prefer fresh over fancy and I like to know how food is made. I’ve been making pizza for quite a while, years probably. The most recent phase is driven by The Pizza Bible and the availability of high quality flour.

How things tend to go:

1. Thursday night: start a dough starter.
2. Friday night: make dough.
3. Saturday: make sauce and sausage.
4. Sunday afternoon: for a sicilian pizza stretch and cook the dough over a 3 hour period.
5. Sunday night: assemble and invite friends over.

The last major ingredient that I had yet to attempt to make was mozarella. According to the internet homemade mozarella is easy to make, you can even make it with your kids. How nice.

I went though every milk available in my grocery store and failed miserably with every one. It was never even close. This went on every night for a week and a half. I wasn’t sure if the issue was the process or the milk so I tried each a few times.

In the end what I learned is if you can’t find a non-homogenized milk you’re done for. Initially I thought that I could use milk that wasn’t ideal and get a less than ideal mozarella but it would still a mozarella. Wrong. If you can’t find milk that isn’t ideal you won’t have mozarella, you’ll have a crumbly mess. Non-homogenized milk is the key. It also need to be pasteurized at lower temperatures but if you find one that is non-homogenized it will probably be low temperature pasteurized. I managed to find some at Whole Foods for $5/half gallon which worked.

The mozarella was amazing. Some friends and I ate it on its own sliced thinly. If you haven’t had fresh made mozarella you haven’t had fresh mozarella. It’s warm (because you just made it), creamy, and stands on its own. The obvious issue is I had to drive 30 minutes each way to pay $5 for a ¹⁄₂ gallon of milk. Fresh mozarella is great but it ain’t cheap or quick. I’m going to start looking for local farms and farmers markets to see if I find something better.

I haven’t yet tried it on pizza. My guess is it’ll take a few attempts which means it will take weeks to get a decent resulting pizza. But once done I think I’ll feel like I’ve accomplished something: a fresh homemade pizza through and through.