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I love string cheese.

I have had some success making homemade mozzarella but I am not particularly skilled yet at kneading the curd. My mozzarella balls sometimes end up with an uneven texture.

How can I knead the curd to end up with sticks where the cheese grain is all parallel along the length of the stick?

** First image hit on Google **
enter image description here

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Sobachatina
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  • Nice one! I love a good cheese stick. – rfusca Jan 10 '12 at 19:11
  • Notice the last 8 question(with the exlusion of my apple pie question) all refer to cheeses. Haha Cheese overload! – Jay Jan 10 '12 at 19:14
  • @Jay this is why: http://meta.cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/1296/its-cheese-week-ask-great-questions-enter-to-win-a-prize – Mien Jan 10 '12 at 19:29
  • @Mien: Ohh! Thanks! I am still relatively new to StackExchange so I did not know about this. They really should have a easier way for people to see this sort of thing. Time to get into cheese mode. – Jay Jan 10 '12 at 19:32
  • Commonly called string cheese! I thought from your title you were talking about the kind people bread and fry - I see two of those images before this one on Google image search, and the rest of the first page is all fried too. – Cascabel Jan 10 '12 at 19:40
  • @Jefromi- you're absolutely right. I corrected the title. – Sobachatina Jan 10 '12 at 19:42

3 Answers3

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Oh you mean cheesesticks not the fried mozzeralla sticks.

I would imagine you would knead it by using the folding method in which you flatten the cheese and fold one end of the cheese over to the other end and continue folding it in that fashion(and the same direction).

Also note that the mozzeralla sticks you buy at grocery stores are machine processed and you can't really hope to achieve that same results/texture.

Jay
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That's called String Cheese, and it's actually quite traditional to a number of cultures ... Italian, Armenian, Mexican, Slovak ... as well as Wisconsin. It's popular around the world because the technique for making it is easily learned and adaptable. You can even make it from store-bought cheese, as well as your own cheese.

  1. Make or buy a stretchy high-temperature (thermophilic) cheese, such as mozzarella.
  2. Heat the cheese in very hot water (traditional method) or the microwave (modern method) until soft, pliable, and stretchy.
  3. Pull the cheese out into a long strand, then double it over. Wear gloves, the cheese will be hot.
  4. Repeat steps 2-3 as many times as necessary.
  5. As the strands start getting thin, twist the cheese into a braid.

This is the sort of thing it's better to see than to describe, but I haven't been able to find a good video showing you how.

FuzzyChef
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  • A bit like making hand drawn noodles for steps 2-3. Maybe search for handdrawn noodle video and see if it's a similar technique. – Jay Jan 12 '12 at 14:09
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The stretch and fold method, over and over. If your cheese is stretching with no curd chunks left, then this stretch fold method makes better string cheese than any I could buy. After the repeated method done, role it into a long snake, then cut to size.

mech
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Ember
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