2026 Apr 13 - Lots of cooking

Gluten free pizza, fresh mozzarella, and junket

Published: 4/13/2026 | Updated: 4/13/2026

Tags: update, cooking, gluten free, cheese, pizza, junket, self hosting, immich

This week was quite busy with work again, but I did finally install Immich, and I also cooked some new foods.

Cooking

I have been gluten free for more than 15 years now, but I just recently found I can eat dairy again, so I’ve been stuffing my face with all different kinds of cheese, and consuming FAR too much whipped cream.

Mozzarella

Given how much cheese I’ve beein consuming, I decided to try my hand at making my own mozzarella. I searched around for recipes and found a lot of variations that all follow the same basic process. I wanted a recipe that used rennet to curdle the milk, but I did use vinegar to help that process along. One recipe I found used rennet only, but that required letting the milk sit overnight, and I was not that patient.

The process is quite simple. You heat the milk to 88 degrees Fahrenheit, and then add the acid and rennet. Then you have to let it sit for a while to curdle. Once it pulls away from the sides of the pot, you cut the curds, heat them up to 105 Fahrenheit, and drain the whey. Once the whey is drained, you have to salt them, heat them, and then stretch them until they become smooth and elastic. Then you’ve got mozzarella!

Everything went smoothly, but all the recipes warned not to overstretch the curds, so I ended up under stretching them, and my cheese didn’t hold together very well. It still tasted good though, and next time I’ll be able to get it a lot closer to what I want.

Pizza

I’ve made gluten free pizza before, but without cheese it was rarely worth the effort. Last time I made pizza I also didn’t have psyllium husk in my repertoire, so this was a multi-pronged experiment.

My dough ended up way too wet because I didn’t account properly for both blooming the yeast AND pre-hydrating the psyllium husk powder. I’ve spent enough time cooking that I usually just make things up by feel, but sometimes that bites me in the ass. Baking is particularly sensitive to exact measurements, and I usually use whole psyllium husk, not powder, so I messed this one up more than usual. Since I could not shape the dough properly, I kinda smooshed it into a rectangle the way I used to before I started using psyllium husk. That also meant it was a bit too thick, but I was going to pre-bake it anyway, so I made it work.

The topping was simple, with sauce, cheese (store bought mozzarella, but not the pre-shredded kind), and some sausage and artichoke hearts. It baked well enough, and despite not really being up to my standards, it tasted good.

Now that I’ve messed it up so much, I’ll be able to make it much better. A less dry dough and a thinner crust should solve most of the issues I had. Maybe I’ll make it again this week?

Junket

I also discovered junket this week, which is a very light pudding-like dessert made with milk and a little sweetener and flavoring, and then set with rennet. I used some of the milk I got for making cheese to make some. It’s SUPER simple to make, and with a touch of maple syrup and vanilla it tasted amazing. All you do is heat the milk, sweetener, and flavoring, add the rennet, and then let it sit for a while.

Immich

I finally got Immich set up and running this week. I’ve been hemming and hawing about using Immich vs Ente for this iteration of my self hosting setup because last time I tried Immich it ran very slowly and struggled with the large number of photos I have. This time, whether due to improvements in the software or the faster server I’m running, it’s performing blazingly fast. Faster even than my experience with Google Photos, which is a pretty high bar.

It’s also laughably easy to set up, which Ente is NOT. The Ente self hosting docs are a lot better than they were a year ago, but there are still a lot of things not very well explained, and I could not get the Minio container to work through Traefik such that both the Ente server and users could directly access the Minio files with the exact same URLs.

In the end, Immich came out on top simply because I got it working and failed with Ente. I don’t need at rest encryption on my home server, so Immich is plenty in this case.