Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images

Mozzarella can be made. At home. Easily. Cheaply. By persons with no special skills or talents. Why did I not know this?

I was beaming in disbelief the first time I kneaded up a ball and sliced off a piece. Soft, cloudlike, fresh as can be: mozzarella that gushes and gets gushed over. I was alone in the kitchen with no one to share the experience with and ended up talking to myself: Goodbye $10 orbs of imported buffalo-milk cheese! Goodbye to anything else!

I learned to make mozzarella from Mario Carbone at Torrisi Italian Specialties, where they serve just-made mozzarella as part of the antipasto spread at dinner. It couldn’t be easier: buy curds from a cheese shop, pour some boiling salted water over them, a little stirring, a little kneading and presto! Mozzarella. (Follow steps 2, 3 and 4 of this recipe in the Dining section; the frying and tomato sauce are for extra credit. There’s a video here, too.)

This kind of mozzarella is best minutes after it’s made, when it’s oozing. A drizzle of olive oil is the only garnish it needs. That’s all you really need to know about making muzz at home, as long as you’ve got an Italian cheese shop (or any shop that makes its own mozzarella, or online cheese pusher like dibruno.com) to get you the right curd. The cheddar-cheese curds beloved by Wisconsinites and the Quebecois are not the same thing.

A couple bonus tips from the Torrisi basement:

1. Cut the curd by forcing it through a cooling rack, the same one you use to cool cookies. The wide mesh creates an evenly cut curd.

2. Once you’ve shaped the mozzarella, you can plunge it into a cold-water bath. At Torrisi, they plunge their mozzarella into cold milk so it doesn’t absorb anything that would dilute its creaminess. Seems a little expensive and fancy to me, but sounds like it makes sense.

I was excited enough about the mozzarella I made that I checked in with some cheesers-in-the-know to learn more about the raw product – mozzarella curd – that I was buying for the first time.

Carbone uses Polly-O Gold cheese curds. (Yes, that Polly-O. Carbone likes to point out the name is from the last name of the Italian-American founder of the company, Giuseppe Pollio.) He and Rich Torrisi said they tried six commercially available curds and judged Polly-O the best; unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a retail source for it.

That doesn’t mean you can’t get it: most cheese shops don’t say what brand or dairy their curd comes from. I forgot to ask at DiPalo’s Fine Foods, my go-to Italian cheese purveyor in New York City, but the curds I bought made perfectly nice mozzarella — a little different from what I’d made with Polly-O, but very nice.

I asked the folks at DiBruno Brothers, an Italian grocery concern based in Philadelphia, which is listed as the online source for curd in Thomas Keller’s “Ad Hoc at Home” (the only cookbook I own with a recipe for mozzarella). Emilio Mignucci, one of the family members who owns the business, wrote back:

“The curd that we use is from Grande.” Grande is another big cheese company, like Polly-O, founded a long, long time ago by a Sicilian immigrant named Filippo Candela. Mignucci continued: “We have been using it for 14 years. We find it to be the best for us because we are able to cut the curd and temper it with 180-degree water (lower temp than the Polly-O used to take) and pull and stretch it very quickly, then drop it into an ice bath to chill. The advantage of this is that working this quickly you lose much less butterfat, therefore it is increasing the yield and ultimately the flavor. This mozz with its higher butterfat content also allows for cooking/melting much better and more evenly at higher temperatures such as wood or coal burning brick ovens tend to have. The cheese stays melded together without separating the yellow butterfat from the curd.”

That kind of describes my experience with the Polly-O stuff, but it’s an argument for their curd, which is ostensibly Keller’s curd, which is a fine endorsement. But what about small dairies making curd? What about making my own?

I asked my friend Mitchell Davis, an excellent home cook, and he said mozzarella only worked for him when he started with purchased curd; the two times he tried to make curd, it didn’t happen.

Mitchell suspected that old rennet sabotaged his curd-making; much of the Internet chatter I’ve read points to ultrapasteurized milk as a culprit. I e-mailed back and forth with Samin Norsat, who teaches mozzarella-making classes in the Bay Area and who cooked at Eccolo and Chez Panisse for years.

She responded to say she doesn’t teach curd-making, mainly for the sake of time: “But I do walk everyone through the process and tell them about how I spent about nine months at Chez Panisse obsessively trying to make curd from scratch every day. This was before the Internet was all-knowing. I ordered some rennet from the Dairy Connection in Wisconsin, and bought a soil-pH tester from the hardware store (since I had no source for a cheese-making pH meter) and called the only cheesemaker I knew, Peggy Smith from Cowgirl for some tips. She told me unequivocally to forget about making mozz curd from scratch, because it’s the single hardest cheese curd to perfect.”

Months later, she finally had a decent technique down. “Now, we have some great curd producers here in the Bay Area,” she notes, “so I’d rather support them doing what they are experts at rather than making a big mess and wasting so much time and milk to get an unguaranteed result.”

Sounds sensible. But really, wouldn’t somebody chase me off a cliff and tell me it was a good idea, an imperative, a duty? I hollered at chessemongress Anne Saxelby, who’s an unfailing booster of small dairies and a hands-on approach to cheese life.

“Yes, people should be making their own curd,” she wrote. Finally! Someone telling me that the easy way wasn’t the best. Anne continued, “It’s not that hard, and the difference between that and Polly-O is night and day. Good milk makes good curd, period. And the curd that we get comes from the Narragansett Creamery in Rhode Island that sources their milk from the St. Alban’s co-op in Vermont, one of the oldest and best dairy co-ops in the land.

“If we could get back to never having to refrigerate mozzarella and just eating it the day it’s made (like from Caputo’s in my hood), that is really the best way to go,” she said. (She’s referring to Caputo’s on Court Street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, a fine Italian-American deli where they make fresh mozzarella daily.) “By the way, I wonder where they get their curd??” she said. “I may have just shot myself in the foot, but I think their mozz is pretty damn good.”

Well, that settles it. I’m gonna leave the curd-making to the pros and to people who’ve got milk to burn – I’ve gotta carry that stuff up three flights of stairs, and the bottles never return themselves.

Bonus note from Anne: Her shop, Saxelby Cheesemongers in the Essex Street Market, will be getting in 10 pounds of curd this Friday from that nice dairy in Rhode Island, in case that’s a convenient option for any would-be mozzarella makers out there.