A few times in my television-viewing career, I have seen cooking shows where someone demonstrates how easy it is to make mozzarella cheese in your own kitchen, by making mozzarella cheese in their own kitchen. The TV chef always tells the audience that he’s making the cheese using water buffalo milk. What this suggests to me is that water buffalo milk is the standard type of milk used in mozzarella cheese.
This confuses me. I’ve been led to believe that mozzarella cheese is an Italian food. But I’ve never been led to believe that Italian cowboys drive vast herds of water buffalo across the open range of the Piedmonte region, or even that Italian dairy farmers trudg out to the milking barn at zero dark-thirty, to hook their dairy water buffalo up to the milking machines. Have I been misinformed about the prevalance of water buffalo on the Italian landscape?
Or is this another vodka-can-be-made-with-other-things-besides-potatoes* thing all over again?
And I doubt that water buffaloes are amenable to be driven in herds across vast plains to be butchered in the Italian equivalent of Kansas City or Chicago. They need to stick close to water.
Traditionally, yes, it’s made of buffalo milk. Less so now because cow’s milk is more widely available. Also, very little Italian made buffalo mozzarella makes it outside of Italy. I’ve only had buffalo milk mozzarella on very few occassions in high end Italian restaurants that source ingredients from local farms. It was great but I’m not sure I’d be able to tell cow from buffalo. Freshness is the thing that’s more important when it comes to good mozzarella.
Hmmph. Last time I rely on the scenery from the “Small World” ride at Disneyland to provide me with comprehensive knowledge of the Larger Mammals of Southern Europe.
If you want to turn your nose up at something, most people go with bourbon or scotch. Tequila, maybe. Don’t pick a neutral spirit and insist it must be made from inferior ingredients.
You misspelled “superior.”
Although I will agree that vodka made from potatoes should be properly referred to as “Poitin.” A bit of sugar beet and malted barley won’t go wrong in the mix, however.
It’s readily available across Europe - every decent sized supermarket in the UK carries buffalo mozzarella. Maybe too expensive to import into the US? It’s a ‘protected’ product in the EU, so supermarkets can’t pass off stuff that isn’t the real thing.
Here’s an example from a big British supermarket chain.
Buratta on other hand is far superior, but a bit harder to find outside Puglia.
I’ve seen it, and purchased it in the US as well. Just not very readily. Specialty Italian food places like Altamonte and DiBruno Bros in Philadelphia often have it. Every now and then Whole Foods will have it. But I’ve never seen it at the supermarkets.
