The Great History of Mozzarella

By Daveid L. Thurmond and Sandra P. Thurmond

This book explores the history of mozzarella di bufala in Italy as well as the modern process of manufacture and the variations in form of this most exquisite and unusual of cheeses. The history of genuine mozzarella is inextricably linked to the history of the Indian buffalo in Italy, a history born of terrible suffering and disease, nurtured by human perseverance and triumph, and flowering in the invention of one of the world's most prestigious food products.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Licosia Edizioni
• Release date: Nov 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9788899796211

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

Mozzarella is, of course, a particular form of cheese, and as such it has common characteristics of all cheeses, as well as specific traits that mark it as one of the world’s most special products.

Cheese is a processed form of milk. Milk is the only common foodstuff which nature has designed specifically as mammalian food, and it is therefore powerful human nutrition. Though milk is surpassed by other foods in specific nutrients, it is unsurpassed as a source of balanced nutrition. By itself a half-liter of cow’s milk provides about 25% of the calories, 40% of proteins, 70% of calcium and riboflavin and 35% of vitamin A and thiamine needed per day by an average five- year-old. The most critical elements of milk for an adult are its proteins, and when combined with a cereal, the amino acids in milk and cereals complement each other perfectly.

But there are serious problems with raw milk. For one thing, milk is extremely perishable. Its liquid state and neutral pH make it especially prone to spoilage and pathogenic microbes, either naturally present in the milk or introduced during handling. Milk often naturally contains human pathogens such as tuberculosis and brucellosis, for example. There is also the fact that milk sugar, lactose, is indigestible by large numbers of people above the age of 3 or 4. This is especially true among Asiatic peoples who do not have the tradition of continu

A collection of cheeses, from soft and runny to hard and granular. All capture the nutritional magic of milk in a safe, digestible form.

ous milk consumption as do many northern Europeans and therefore do not continue to produce the enzymes which allowed them to digest milk in infancy. Thus we have a food with high nutritional value but low digestibility and biological stability.

It is hardly surprising, then, that early cultures, perhaps as early as Neolithic times, discovered methods for processing milk into more stable and digestible forms which could be consumed over time. Among those products was cheese. Earliest evidence of cheesemaking comes from Mesopotamia and dates from about 7,000 BCE. Manufacture of goats’ milk cheeses was common in ancient Egypt, and cheese is frequently mentioned in the Bible. Homer speaks several times of cheeses, most notably the ewes’ milk cheeses made by the cyclops Polyphemos. The Greek historian Herodotus speaks of mares’ and asses’ milk cheeses made by the nomadic Scythians and Phrygians of his day (c. 450 BCE). And in classical Rome, cheeses were being imported from all over the Western world, from as far away as France, and were also being made in a variety of styles in many parts of Italy and even in the city itself.

But what exactly is cheese? Cheese is a solid or semi-solid substance formed from the solids of milk which have been denatured (i.e., made to form into small clumps of proteins and fats called curds) by acids and/or heat and then separated from the whey, the liquid remains of milk, by a coagulant such as rennet. Cheese is most often acidified by benevolent bacteria either naturally occurring in milk or added in the form of a ‘starter culture’. These helpful little microbes include species of Streptococcus, Leuconostoc, Pediococcus, and Lactobacillus which metabolize lactose into lactic acid. And, happily enough, different species thrive best at various temperatures ranging from 37°C, the natural temperature of milk, up to about 50°C. Thus, if the milk is heated very slowly and carefully, one colony of bacteria will begin the fermentation process and partially acidify the milk, and when these little organisms are exhausted, a colony of another species will take over.

Traditional societies use various unglazed terra cotta vessels for the purpose, and in these vessels are present the forerunners of a vigorous colony. Altemately, cheesemakers simply retain a portion of the whey from a previous successful fermentation and add this to the next day’s milkings as a ‘starter’ (inoculum).

Provided the milk is not scalded to a temperature that kills all microbes, they will continue to slowly metabolize lactic acid for many

Heating sheep's milk for cheeses in the Greek islands. Photo by Martin Brigdale from Aglaia Kremezi, The Foods of Greece (New York, 1993).

months or even several years after the cheese is made. That is why an aged cheese is tangier in taste than a fresh cheese. But early on, traditional societies discovered that they could greatly facilitate the curdling of milk by adding a coagulant, especially rennet, a substance traditionally from the stomach linings of suckling mammals. Rennet contains the lactose enzymes chymosin (formerly renin) and smaller portions of pepsin. Altemately, various botanical agents are used, such as flower of wild thistle, safflower seeds, fig tree sap (latex), or green pine nuts. After a relatively short time, often as little as half an hour, a firm gel is set, at which point the gel is cut into small pieces, and these so-called ‘curds’ float in the ‘whey’, a liquid portion containing water and leftover fats and proteins. The curds are then physically separated from the whey. The curds are often salted to promote further draining and put into a permeable container of some sort to allow more whey to drain as the solid portion begins to assume the shape we recognize as cheese. In traditional societies these little forms (the word which gives several modern words for cheeses, such as formaggio in Italian and fromage in French) are made of wicker, and the imprint of wicker on many traditional French and Italian cheeses is regarded as a sign of their artisanal origins. But today most such forms are made of plastic. After an hour or so, the form is inverted and a little ‘farmer’s cheese’ is removed, to be eaten within a week or two.

Hard cheeses are treated differently at this point. They are typically wrapped in a loosely woven cloth, cheesecloth, and placed in or under a press to force even more whey to exude (the technical term is syneresis). This is because spoilage microbes need a certain amount of moisture to survive, so a dense, dry cheese is very stable. When the desired moisture level on the inside of the cheese, the ‘paste’, has been reached, the cheese is typically removed from the press and cheesecloth and placed in a brine, a solution of salt and water.

Brining Parmigiano-Reggiano cheeses. Photo by John Dominis from Giuliano Bugialli, Foods of Italy (New York, 1984).

Salt, because of its osmotic or hypertonic action, chemically ‘dries’ the exterior of the cheese so that it forms a leathery rind, which serves as an impermeable barrier to further drying of the cheese. Hard cheeses of this sort are often placed in a cool, humid storage room for several months so that their flavors can further develop.

Aging cheeses in a pantry of a Greek farmhouse. Brigdale(1993).

Parmigiano cheese, for example, is a very dense cheese which by law must be aged for at least 18 months and may be aged for up to 24 before it is sold.

But our story has to do with a soft cheese; in fact, perhaps the softest of all traditional cheeses. There is