Sunday, May 4, 2008

You can learn something new every day...


(photo: Jon Sullivan)
This is not much to do with Denmark, but something I learned last week after reading about a dioxin scare amongst Italian farms producing milk to make mozzarella cheese.

In all my 40-ish years of chomping away on mozzarella cheese, I had absolutely no idea it was produced from buffalo milk. I had to read the line in the article twice, as I thought I’d just imagined seeing the word buffalo.

I think it threw me because, first of all, I had a hard time picturing buffalos in Italy and then I began to wonder about the process of milking a buffalo, envisioning groups of excited Italians milling chaotically around trying to get the big beasts to stand still.

And, I wonder who the first Italian was to wake up one day and think, “I’m going to import some buffalos and make a cheese called mozzarella!”

So there you go, you might be as surprised as I was to realise I don’t know everything.

3 comments:

Irene said...

Just to let you know, it is only the mozzarella cheese clearly marked as made from buffalo that is just that. Buffalo mozzarella is the gourmet variety, the ordinary stuff is just made from normal whole milk.

NotQuiteDanish said...

Oh I see. I guess in that case I may have never tasted the real thing. I must - although I might give it a while to let this dioxin drama get fixed. Have you tried it? Is there a big difference in taste?

Irene said...

I have had it a few times and buffalo mozzarella is creamy deliciously luxurious!!!