The big cheese

REAL DEAL: Artisan produced Mozzarella is distinguishable from the rest

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The Italian buffalo is a massive beast with eyes that glow red and a bony rump. Resistant to any change in routine, it is happiest wallowing in mud, lying in the pasture and poking its wet nose into a mound of feed.

However, since the 12th century Italian buffaloes are the reason we have fresh, pillow-soft, white mozzarella cheese.

Mozzarella comes chiefly from Italy's Campania region around Naples. Although theories abound, no-one knows when or how the buffalo first arrived from Africa and Asia. My passion for the cheese recently led me on a driving tour to the traditional land of mozzarella. About an hour south of Rome, I turned off the E45 Autostrada at the Caianello exit, got on a country road that seemed headed toward the mountains and eventually found La Fenice, a mozzarella dairy, or "caseificio", outside the hamlet of Presenzano.

At the hangar-like building in the middle of farm fields, I got my first whiff of buffalo, so rank it could make a shovel stand up on its own. But the little shop in front was ruthlessly clean, its display case heaped with dairy products such as buffalo milk pudding and ricotta. And a vat where fresh mozzarella balls bobbed, unrefrigerated, in a sea of viscous liquid.

Mozzarella fact No 1: Fresh mozzarella made from unpasteurised buffalo milk does not belong in the refrigerator. It is best kept at room temperature and optimally should be eaten within two days of production.

I asked for two medium-size mozzarellas, and the clerk scooped cheese baseballs into plastic bags filled with "keeping water", packaged the way pet stores sell goldfish. I drove down the road, parked by a cherry orchard, leaned out the window and punctured the bag, spurting liquid on to the side of the car. With the cheese slithering in my hands, I took a bite, breaking through the thin, shiny rind into dissolving layers of musky tasting paradise, juice streaming down my chin. It was not a pretty sight but exactly the way fresh mozzarella should be eaten.

Mozzarella fact No 2: Caprese salad (mozzarella, tomatoes and basil) is delicious, and leftover cheese is fine for cooking. But to purists, with fresh buffalo milk mozzarella, any accompaniment is superfluous.

I was headed for the town of Caserta with its 1200-room palace built about 1750 by Charles VII of Bourbon, then ruler of the Kingdom of Naples. He was succeeded by his son, Ferdinand IV, a monarch who had the soul of a peasant, ate macaroni with his fingers and started a buffalo- breeding farm outside Caserta.

The town is now part of the unbroken urban sprawl that coats the coastal plain north of Mount Vesuvius, virtually a suburb of Naples, known for crime, litter, poverty, corruption and occasional earthquakes. On the upside, the greater Neapolitan area has Pompeii, Herculaneum, the Bay of Naples and mozzarella-topped pizza margherita, invented by a local pizza chef for the 1889 visit of Italian Queen Margherita.

I stopped in Caserta because, together with Salerno about 80 kilometres south, it is a mozzarella production centre, home of a consortium founded in 1981 to protect and promote bona fide, officially regulated Mozzarella di Bufala Campana"..

Mozzarella fact No 3: Signs for dairy outlets along the highways in the Naples area are common. Some sell excellent mozzarella. If you always want the real thing, look for caseificios bearing the Denominazione d'Origine Protetta, or DOP seal, a European Union certification that guarantees top-quality Campania mozzarella.

The very finest DOP cheese never leaves the region because it is made from unpasteurised milk and has a shelf life of only a few days. The consortium monitors cheese production to meet DOP standards. But last year health officials found elevated levels of dioxin in samples of mozzarella.

A spokesperson for the mozzarella consortium Luigi Chianese said EU monitors discovered low levels of contamination in milk from about 20 of the 2000-odd buffalo dairies in Campania.

"Not one bocconcino (a miniature mozzarella ball) of DOP cheese was found to have dioxin," he said.

Mozzarella fact No 4: It's easy to spot the difference between handmade mozzarella and machine-produced cheese. Each artisanal ball has a Y-shaped flap marking the place where it was seamed by the cheese maker, or "casaro".

In the summer, sightseers visit the nearby ruins of Paestum, a Greek colony founded around 600BC featuring three majestic Doric-columned temples.

But my objective was the Tenuta Vannulo farm near the town of Capaccio Scalo. It is known for organic mozzarella and ricotta cheese.

Mozzarella fact No 5: Ricotta cheese is made from a milky mozzarella byproduct. In Italy ricotta is served for dessert surrounded by honey, orange peel, cinnamon and other condiments.

Tenuta Vannulo has 500 buffalo that feed on pesticide-free grass and grain produced at the farm. Mozzarella, ricotta, yoghurt and icecream are made daily and sold only on the premises because the owner thinks pasteurisation affects the quality.

The estate is centred on the family home, a Pompeii-red villa, and a cafe where the house speciality is a rich buffalo milk gelato on brioche pastry with a dollop of whipped cream.

Mozzarella fact No 6: A one-cup serving of the cheese is loaded with protein and has virtually no carbohydrates. Of course, it also has 336 calories, 220 of them from fat.

At the picture window-lined dairy, visitors watch workers adding scalding water to honeycombed wedges of fermented buffalo milk and stirring with a wooden stick until the goo turns into a shiny mass. Then warm globules of it are kneaded by two workers while another one pulls off smaller lumps, shapes them into balls and tosses them into a vat.

Mozzarella fact No 7: The name of the cheese comes from the Italian verb "mozzare", which means to lop or cut.

Mozzarella fact No 8: Eating mozzarella cheese promotes intelligence and good looks. OK, that hasn't been proved. But but it does make people happy. I know that for a fact. Los Angeles Times

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