BEST CHEESES

Not the Mozzarella You Know

By Hilary Prendini Toffoli

Soft, white mozzarella made from buffalo milk is one of Italy’s great delicacies and it’s now being made in the Cape Hilary Prendini Toffoli meets the herd.

‘Though buffalo milk has a higher fat and protein content than cow’s milk, it’s substantially lower in cholesterol, and palatable to people who are lactose-intolerant’

‘The difficulty with mozzarella is getting the nuances right … It’s handmade and requires strong arms, serious physical effort and hands that can handle intense heat’

My first taste of mozzarella di bufala was at lunch in the home of my sister-in-law, Romana, in a village near Verona. She brought a bowl of mozzarella di bufala balls to the table, amid a chorus of delighted noises from the family. Following an antipasto of prosciutto and melon, they were served as the main course along with artichoke hearts and salad.

They looked very different from the mozzarella that I buy at my local Cape Town supermarket. That mozzarella comes in plaited koeksuster shapes, wedges or balls, and is on the distinctly rubbery side, so firm you can play bocce with the balls on your back stoep. It doesn’t have much flavour either, but it does become nice and stringy when grated on a homemade pizza.

These mozzarella di bufala balls were considerably whiter. A porcelain white, and bathed in a milky liquid. They looked more like peeled soft-boiled eggs than cheese, and certainly didn’t strike me as being one of the great delicacies of Italian cuisine.

Then someone kindly put a ball on my plate. I sliced off a bit, as they were all doing round the table, sprinkled it with salt and olive oil, and put it in my mouth. No bread or biscuit, just on its own to savour the flavour.

It was manna from heaven. 

On a different stretch of cheese turf altogether from the cows’ milk mozzarella I’d always eaten. Soft and moist with a fresh and discreetly sweeter flavour difficult to describe, but which a health nut like me immediately recognised as wholesome, in fact so extremely good for you that you could cheerfully guzzle the whole bowl and not feel in any way intestinally overburdened.

There was much talk around the table about the fact that this particular mozzarella di bufala came from the Campania region. Those once-swampy plains down south near Naples have been the home of Italy’s great mozzarellas di bufala, I later discovered, since the days of the Goths, who brought the water buffalo to Italy from Asia. 

Though buffalo milk has a higher fat and protein content than cow’s milk, making it more suitable to the production of a stretched curd cheese like mozzarella, it’s substantially lower in cholesterol, and has proved palatable to people who are lactose-intolerant. 

Of course you pay for all of this. Mozzarella di bufala is more expensive to produce, even in Italy. And much more so in those countries outside Italy that have successfully managed to breed water buffalo for mozzarella, so far only Australia and the States. 

Now South Africa has joined the mozzarella di bufala club. It’s been the dream of some of the country’s top cheesemakers for a while, but the realities of importing these animals are daunting. It took a Johannesburg advocate named Wayne Rademeyer to pull it off, and it’s been an arduous project. 

Wayne got the idea when he was a 34-year-old lawyer at the Johannesburg Bar. Five years later—considerably older and wiser—he’s become a cheesemaker, moved to the Cape and given up law. With a thriving herd of 39 water buffalo on a farm outside Wellington—five of them born here—he’s in the process of launching on to the Cape market the mozzarella di bufala he and his wife have just learnt to make in Italy. She’s Michelle Couzyn Rademeyer, head of legal services for a Cape Town property company.

We drive out to Inyathi Ridge on a blue Cape day. Deep in the gloriously mountainous Berg River valley, it’s a small table grape farm with undulating green pastures for the buffalo to graze on, an improvement on a lot of Italian set-ups, few of which are totally free range.

The whole Couzyn family is involved one way or the other. They’ve all fallen in love with these huge, gentle, highly intelligent beasts. 

“They’re strong, tough animals,” says Wayne. “Contrary to expectations there have been no problems with adaptation. We’ve given them a few small pools to wallow in and they’re thriving. That part of Australia is on a similar latitude as South Africa and has a similar climate. 

“The really difficult part was sourcing animals acceptable for importation to South Africa. The Department of Veterinary Services won’t take the risk of diseases being brought in, so the buffalo had to be from a country whose protocols they can trust. Most European countries have disease issues. So we got ours from an Australian cheesemaker who’s given us exclusive rights to his animals.” 

An equally difficult part is producing the cheese. Not the easiest way of making a living. But mozzarella di bufala has become Wayne’s passion.

He and Michelle have just returned from Italy where they attended the four-day 8th World Buffalo Congress in Caserta in the Campania region. With buffalo breeders from Vietnam to Vermont, they attended lectures on everything from feeding, milk production and biotechnology, to the rearing of animals in the new developing countries.

Then off they went to do a cheese technology course in Eboli, also in Campania, presented by the local buffalo authorities in conjunction with the congress.

“The difficulty with mozzarella is getting the nuances right, the little things,” is how Wayne puts it. “Mozzarella is one of the stretched curd cheeses known as pasta filata. It’s handmade as they’ve done throughout history, and requires strong arms, serious physical effort and hands that can handle intense heat.

“You curdle the milk first with a coagulating agent to form curds and whey. After draining off the whey, you put the curd into very hot water—above 90 degrees Celsius—to make it pliable, and then keep stretching it, like pasta, till it’s shiny and homogenous. Finally you mould it into balls and drop them into cold water that immediately forms a skin which keeps the moisture inside. It sounds easy but you have to get the acidity levels right, and that takes experience.

“We’re not necessarily trying to create an Italian product. We’re trying to make a mozzarella di bufala in a South African environment, with South African conditions. The same way our winemakers create wines that are South African.”

So I’m not expecting much when he gives me and my Italian husband some of his mozzarella di bufala to taste, especially since he says it’s still in the experimental stages. In appearance it’s identical to the mozzarella di bufala I’ve eaten at my sister-in-law’s table—the same pretty, porcelain-white, egg shape—it turns out to be also almost identical in taste and texture as well, with a similar fresh, delicious flavour, and soft, moist, sponginess. A real treat.

He plans to have his mozzarella di bufala on sale in selected Cape Town delis and restaurants by January under the Inyathi Ridge label. Prices will be competitive with the Italian product, and, as Wayne hastens to point out, his product will not contain the preservatives the Italians usually put in theirs, when they export, to extend its shelf life. 

Meanwhile he has ricotta di bufala in the pipeline, followed by yoghurt and maybe even ice cream. 

You can get hold of Wayne at 082-375-0977 or wayner@iafrica.com.