November 19, 2009
Like most of us in this country I was pretty ignorant about mozzarella. We admire the Daz-white of its virgin state, the gloopy chewiness when melted. But the British don’t really go for things that are more about texture than taste, or not since suet was removed from the national diet. Like so many Mediterranean ingredients that come in specialised forms — olive oil is one — we don’t understand mozzarella and we abuse it.
At many delis, even when the fresh buffalo mozzarella sells for nearly £30 a kilogram, or £7 a tennis ball, you’ll find it hard to discover whether the snowballs of cheese in a bowl of the salty water is made from the milk of buffalo or cows (fior di latte). But these are important distinctions. Of course most southern Italians would spurn any “fresh” mozzarella more than 24 hours old. But they are eating mozzarella as God intended it, unpasteurised.
Here we’re now aware that you can eat mozzarella in a salad. But I’ve been in restaurants where they’ve used the stuff that comes shrink-wrapped in a brick. And drenching good mozzarella with balsamic vinegar is barbaric — as much of an insult to the delicate salty flavour as loading it with ketchup. But the thing that amuses Italian cooks is our squandering of the expensive stuff — fresh and wet — on pizza toppings. That is plain ignorant.
You can occasionally get fresh, unpasteurised mozzarella at Borough Market in London, but it will have been flown in from Italy. Most of the few British makers, like the McCreerys at Gifford near Edinburgh, have been warned off using raw milk by health and safety concerns. But at Golden River Farms, where 60 buffalo are kept in the Purbeck Hills in Dorset, unpasteurised milk is used. The farm pledges to send mozzarella within 24 hours of making it. In DC, you can get it fresh at Vace on Connecticut Avenue.
Edinburgh’s famous deli Valvona and Crolla sells good pasteurised mozzarella, and occasionally the extraordinary treat of burrata. This is a shell of mozzarella encasing thick, very faintly sour cream. It’s the cheese equivalent of a great chocolate truffle, and about as costly. Mary Contini, the chef and co-proprietor of Valvona’s, says she would use fresh mozzarella in some cooked dishes — particularly winter fillers such as lasagne al forno or an aubergine parmigiana, where the mozzarella adds a gorgeous creaminess. If you want a parmigiana recipe, there’s an excellent one in Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s Italy cookbook.
Unlike most cheeses, mozzarella is not named for place, but how it is made. Mozza is a Neapolitan word meaning “cut”, and the cheese is indeed chopped, torn and even knotted when it is a mass of coagulated curd in the hot salty water at Francesco’s dairy. Another variety he and his mother sell is stracciatella — from the Italian verb meaning “tear to bits”: it becomes little shreds of mozzarella inside a shell of the stuff. It was blissful eating and the children crammed it in.
I like my fresh mozzarella served in the style known as caprese or tricolore — the latter because the basil leaves, sliced tomato, and mozzarella make the same three colours as the Italian flag. But this salad is not as easy as it sounds: if the tomatoes aren’t full of flavour and perfectly ripe they’ll let you down like a drunken dad at a wedding. I asked Mary Contini how she would eat mozzarella. “The way my ancestors did in Mondragone: fresh, from the farm dairy, sliced with a little olive oil and salt, at room temperature. A treat, like an ice cream.”"
