Okay friends, for no particular reason and what will no doubt be quite a belaboured way I'm going to write down my quick and dirty procedure for making "mozzarella" on pizza nights.

I say "mozzarella" because it's not the DOP kind nor is it the "proper", week-long process for making mozzarella at home. But it makes a very nice (and affordable) mozzarella-like cheese, perfect for pizza but also for a caprese or similar.

Of course you'd be crazy to do this in Italy, but imported mozzarella in New Zealand costs around $60 per kilogram which is just too much for pizza.

So your alternative is to but """'mozzarella"""" with lots more scare quotes than mine. And they're fine, but still salty processed nightmares at the end of the day. The cheapest is the best, this one.

That's actually cheaper than what I make at home. And it's fine, I used it for years. But I got tired of making do eventually. So anyway here's most of what you need.

[hang on, multi-multitasking. Back in a few minutes.]

Firstly, then, it's supermarket full-cream milk. I see no reason to go further upmarket than a $11 investment in four litres of Meadowfresh Famhouse, I doubt you'd get a better yield or flavour with anything other than raw milk, which you can't buy in New Zealand. Thanks, Obama!

The grey top Anchor equivalent *could* be a viable alternative but the last two times I tried with it are the only times I failed so I stopped buying it. Other ingredients are tap water, citric acid ($2.79 from Countdown) and rennet (roughly $7 from a homebrew supplier).

I don't know who our ancestor was who figured out if you took a bit of cow stomach and mixed it with milk it would curdle the casein but we owe them so, so much. (Note: the rennet and citric acid will last you for several batches, not just one.)

We also need some equipment: a large steel pot, a clip thermometer ($15-18) a couple of bowls, a long thin-bladed knife, a wooden spoon and whatever you call these.

Firstly: fill one of you bowls with tap water, dissolve a suitable amount of salt in it and place it in the freezer. You'll need it in an hour or so.

Pour the milk into your pot. Dissolve half a tablespoon of citric acid in a cup of water, add it to the milk and stir energetically. Heat up on low heat to 34°C. This is what 34°C looks like.

Take the pot off the element. Mix half a teaspoon of rennet in 50ml of tap water, add it to the milk, stir *gently* for 30 seconds, cover with a lid and leave for ten minutes. Something magical is going to happen.

Take the lid off and lo! The milk is now solid. Cut it with the knife in squares. Put it back on the element and heat again on a low flame to 54°C.

There is a tricky bit here: the temperature you're measuring is that of the whey, below the solid curds that have risen to the surface of the pot. So you want to make sure the probe of your thermometers is reaching down far enough. Getting the right temperature is critical.

Oh, I forgot: you stir the curds from time to time during this phase. Once the temperature is reached, take the pot off the element, cover and leave for 10 more minutes.

Place the mesh bowl filter on one of your bowls. Using the slotted thingamabob, take the mass of curds out of the pot and place it in the bowl filter, pressing gently as you go to squeeze out the excess whey. It'll look something like this. Almost cheese already.

Pot with the whey goes back on the element, along with a tablespoon of salt. Heat up to 85°C, on a high flame is fine now.

Take the almost-cheese lump and put it in the bowl. Cover with the hot whey. Leave for minutes five.

Sorry, I couldn't quite photograph what happens next. Don some dishwashing gloves, take the almost-cheese out of the bowls and let gravity stretch it. Fold it upon itself. Do these four-five times, it doesn't take long at all. Work it into a sort of plait.

This is best done over or into a sink, because it makes quite a lot of splashes.

Take the bowl of water out of the freezer. I split it into two containers ready to receive the mozzarella and give it the thermal shock it requires.

Cut your mozzarella into strips. I get around 550 grams and split it into seven parts of around 80 grams each - that's the quantity I use to top a 30 cm pizza. Work each strip into a ball the way you would a bread roll, tucking it into itself as it were.

Yes this is a very sexy focaccia but let's not get distracted.

Are we finished. Yes, sort of. The whole process takes an hour and sets you back $12-13. But you can get a bit more value out of it by squeezing some ricotta out of the remaining whey. So put the pot back on the fire, and heat it up to 95°C or thereabouts.

Take the bowl filter and cover it with a muslin cloth if you have it. Pour the whey through. It will take a few hours to drain completely but you'll be left with 100-150 grams of fresh ricotta at the end. Result!

And yes back to the mozzarella it will improve the taste of your home made pizza a lot.

That's it let me know if I left something out.

PS: the newly acquired source of affordable, plausible mozzarella made me re-discover a humble dish of Southern Italian cooking, mozzarella in carrozza (literally, "mozzarella in a carriage"). It's a lot of fun to make and your kids will love you for it.

Traditionally it was made with sliced home-made bread, as a way of making both the cheese and the bread itself go a bit further. These days you make it using white sandwich bread. Cut off the crusts, then make little sandwiches fill cheese and ham or anchovies or what you like.

Then you coat them with egg and bread crumbs and deep fry them. That's it. But there are a few tricks.

One is to drain the mozzarella of excess liquid. The other is the double coating, so that nothing leaks out in the frying process. You go flour, (salted) egg, breadcrumbs, ensuring at each step to cover the whole surface, including the open sides.

Then you leave them in the fridge or freezer for half an hour or so, so the first coating "sets", then you take them out and you coat them again, this time with egg and breadcrumbs only - no flour. Then in the fridge or freezer again for another 15-30 minutes.

Then you deep fry in vegetable oil, ca. 170°C, for a couple of minutes on each side. If they leave behind a clear oil with no crumbs or debris, you made the perfect mozzarella in carrozza.

As an extra bonus, you can fit four in a square sistema box.

Knew all those years spent playing tangram would pay off.

The gods of cheese are smiling on me. Through trial and error, I have improved greatly on the recipe and yield.

New ingredient: calcium chloride, a quarter teaspoon diluted in 60 mls of water and added at the same time as the rennet (mix for 30 seconds, as with the rennet). You'll find it in brew shops for ca $4 a bottle and at this rate will last me for the rest of my life.

Besides this, I have slowed things down: half hour wait for curds, and a much slower second heating up phase, plus this time I stop at 48°C instead of going up to 54°C.

The result is much better, and I get close to 700 g of cheese from four l litres of milk. I'm rich! I mean look at it.

LOOK AT IT

Classy large M&M tub of mozzarella left after making four pizzas.

I suppose the calcium accounts for using non raw milk. And it probably brings Anchor back into play if you can't find the Farmhouse kind (which they don't stock at Pak n Save for instance).

A whole new concurrent experiment: making panettone with pasta madre, the (less liquid, less sour) Italian version of sourdough.