There are another 11 weeks to go in my year of cheese and I have decided to ditch the format I have used so far for something a little bit more free flowing. Not that my previous rambles have been paragons of structured writing, but I am doing away with the listing at the top of the post (the “cheese – producer – where” bit) and I am having as much or as little cheese as I want. There are weeks where I munch away at the cheeses we got during some wild cheese-buying spree (our weekend in the Jura Mountains comes to mind) and nothing new enters our life – such was the case in the weeks after the Désalpe. Conversely, when I travel, there are new places to be explored and with them come new cheeses to write about. The past week has been one of those. After I ventured into the wild world of Greek cheese, I arrived in Naples and I had to get some Mozzarella di Bufala Campana.
That’s a mouthful in more than one ways. It’s a cheese that is made from the milk of water buffalo in the Campania region of Italy, just south of Naples. And it’s a mouthful because you can’t really eat a tiny bit of it. The idea is that you get it as fresh as possible, and you buy it in a bag in some liquid, mostly a light brine, in a few cases whey. And you take a ball out of the liquid and you stick the whole thing in your mouth. Just like that. You can buy it in smaller and larger balls, sometimes in braids. It is a cheese that is kneaded, much like a dough, while hot water is poured on it and with that, it gets a degree of elasticity. No, that doesn’t mean the cheese is chewy. It has just a little give before it breaks when you bite into it – think of it as al dente: not too hard, not to soft – just right. Obviously, you run of the mill mozzarella doesn’t delight quite like this. My cheese was one day old, was as white as porcelain and had that perfect textural balance – and it really just tastes like cream. Nice, clean, ever so slightly salty cream. The Consorzio Tutela di Bufala Campana – a club that promotes this particular cheese, has some cool pictures of the magnificent bufala this cheese comes from on their website. The saddest thing about fresh Mozzarella is the what all the other Mozzarella tastes like. If you meet an Italian abroad who seems to be carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders – he’s probably just homesick for some Mozzarella di Bufala Campana that was still milk two days ago.
So the cheese was reason enough to love Naples, but there was a lot more. It is not a particularly clean city, there is quite a bit of graffiti and as a port, it has it big industrial zones right on the water – welcome to cranes and containers. But let it grow on you for half an hour and it becomes a glorious display of disorderly conduct, from the way people get their coffee and pastries at Scaturchio to how they hand their laundry in the impossibly narrow streets where you have to look up, up, up to see the sky and to the way the makers of terra cotta nativity characters display their things with a decent sprinkling of soccer players. More than anyone else in that particular category of Saints, Diego Maradona, the Argentinian enfant terrible is still revered. Mixed in with the nativities are also local characters made from terra cotta. I brought one home and Christine is insisting that I am putting him in a room where she doesn’t have to look at him.
His name is Sciò Sciò, he has a hump that you’re supposed to rub for good luck, so I don’t get the problem. Finally – not finally, there is a lot more, but the post needs to come to an end at some stage – there are the pastries. Two in particular I must speak of: the pastiera, originally eaten at Easter (really, the Neapolitans don’t want to eat these all the time??) which is made with ricotta cheese, eggs, wheat berries and some very, very fine orange flavor. I got one in a beautiful box to take home to the family (much appreciated, best husband/dad in the world) and the sfogliatelle, where I must give a shout out to my friend Patricia who introduced them to me.
These ricotta-filled shells are made of crackly, superthin, deliciously buttery layers of dough. Bite into one and you will find yourself in the middle of an explosion of razor thin crumbles: so much goodness is such a little pastry!
Visitors come to Naples, give it a passing glance and continue to Pompeii or Herculaneum. Yes, those are some very awesome ruins, centuries old. But when have those ancient Romans every given you anything good to eat ?
Cheese: Buffalo Blue
52 Cheeses 