Unresolved Filament stuck to outside of extruder

Good Morning,

I've finished a print last night where everything worked perfectly. Wanted to start a second print, but this happened:



What could have caused this? I'm new to all of this. If you need additional information about print settings, please let me know. I'm not sure which information is relevant.

Can I get rid of the material? If yes, what's the best way?

Thanks a lot,
EL

 

Mark already told you how to clean out the material so I'm just going to answer the "what caused this part".
This is what you get when extruding without having the filament cling to something (typically the bed when at the beginning of a print). Imagine that you position your hotend somewhere in the air, heat it up and just start feeding filament; this is what you would get after a while, since the filament tends to curl up after extrusion and then starts to glue itself to everything.

I'd say the most probable causes for this would be a wrong z-offset and/or incorrect leveling/tramming. Did you check the beginning of the print to see if the first few layers went off smoothly?