Instructions
Italy’s most famous salad is also one of its simplest, the Caprese. A basic scattering of ripe tomatoes, basil leaves and slices of buffalo mozzarella is all that is required, before finishing with salt, olive oil and a good quality balsamic vinegar. Pepper is sometimes used, but only with restraint.
While there is nothing intrinsically complex about the salad itself, the cheese does bear further consideration.
Buffalo mozzarella? As in cheese made from the milk of Asian water buffalo? In Italy?
Well, yes.
Water buffalo had been brought from India to the Middle East by the 5th century BC. The Norman occupiers of Sicily appear to have then introduced them to Italy from North Africa around 1000AD, mostly to work as beasts of burden. Buffalo have wide-set hooves that made them perfectly suited to ploughing the softer soils of the southern Italian peninsula.
Buffalo milk production was, at first, seen only as a beneficial by-product, as cows were already widely farmed. But there were real advantages to milking buffalo rather than cattle. While it takes 14kg of cow milk to produce 1kg of butter, you need only 9½kg of buffalo milk to achieve the same result. Higher productivity made perfect sense to any farmer.
In cheeses the milk is transformative. Not only does production almost double, but he higher fat content of the milk makes for the creamiest and most delicate curd which, when heated gently, can be made elastic. It is this textural quality that defines the traditional mozzarella.
Some variations of the authentic buffalo milk cheeses are made with cow milk, both here and also in Italy. Artisan-style cow milk mozzarella is called ‘fior de latte’ (“flower of milk”), and is also available as bite-sized pieces called bocconcini. But while they can be equally delicious, they lack the richness of the buffalo version.
There are a few buffalo milk cheese makers in Australia, mostly in Victoria and Queensland. Their quality is exceptional, yet the small scale makes prices exorbitant. Nonetheless, imported buffalo mozzarella is readily available from most good Italian delicatessens.
The most critical thing is to serve it simply – don’t trick it up too much. Because buffalo milk mozzarella is a classic example of the basic principle of great Italian food – when you do less, the ingredients can do more.