cheese Archives - attheitaliantable.com

April 20, 2019 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Mozzarella and Burrata, two of our favorite Italian cheeses

We’ve always loved mozzarella. Polly-O was the brand our grandmother served for breakfast. It was a treat that we only got when visiting her in New York as it wasn’t available in our market in Washington DC way back then. Mozzarella was the cheese of her roots in the old country and she lamented that Polly-O paled in comparison to what she grew up with. We thought it was pretty delicious and loved to play with it, pulling off strings of the cheese a little at a time. Mozzarella is the original string cheese.

Even though mozzarella is now industrially made even in Italy, its roots are in the southern regions of Campania, the capital of which is Naples, and Puglia, which is the ancient, and yet somehow stylish, heel of the stiletto boot of Italy. You can still find the little neighborhood caseificio’s that make small-batch, fresh mozzarella every morning and sell it at the counter in front of the store. Made with fresh cows’ milk, mozzarella curds are melted and formed into balls or braids and kept in salted water until used. Great eaten as is, the soft, stringy cheese also melts beautifully and is delicious when eaten hot. Perfect for pizza, another delectable invention from Naples!

But Puglia has managed to take mozzarella to a whole new level by inventing burrata! Made by forming fresh mozzarella into a bag and stuffing it with fresh buttery curds of the same mozzarella, burrata is delicate and creamy. Fresh burrata is best enjoyed simply: a drizzle of great olive oil, a sprinkle of salt, some ripe tomatoes and a little lettuce is all you need to really enjoy it.

As a fresh cheese, mozzarella and burrata are best eaten the day they’re made. After all, they’ll make more tomorrow morning and you’ll go back down to the shop to buy it fresh. That’s what the southern Italians do: buy what they need, eat or use it that day, then go back to get what they need tomorrow. Such a luxury!

Because fresh mozzarella and burrata don’t travel well, most of what we find for sale in the US is made domestically. It’s not bad. Some of it is quite decent and delectable, in its own way. Some of it, like the low fat/part skim plastic-packaged variety is quite bad to eat on its own but passes muster when melted on a pizza. And the “homemade” or “house made” mozzarella you see in specialty stores and restaurants isn’t really any better. You too can purchase industrially made curd and melt it on the stovetop to come up with “fresh mozzarella”.

There is nothing like the artisan mozzarella and burrata we eat when we visit the small, family-owned caseificio’s on our tours to Puglia and Campania! There is something viscerally satisfying when you bite into a ball of fresh mozzarella, and milk, not water, drips out from the fresh curds.

That experience alone is worth a trip to Italy!

October 22, 2014 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

October is Pizza Month!!

October is Pizza Month, everyone’s favorite Italian food! Originally from Naples, where it was street food, pizza was brought to the American shores by the hordes of Napolitani that immigrated in the late 18-early 19th century. It didn’t spread to the rest of Italy until after WWII, but its cheesy goodness has found a home throughout the world.

In my family, every Friday night was pizza night. Mom made the dough in the afternoon and allowed it to rise, then punched it out onto a baking sheet, covered it with tomato sauce and Polly-O whole milk mozzarella, a sprinkle of basil and oregano and a drizzle of olive oil. Served with lentil soup, that was Friday night supper for years and years. And the leftover pizza sat on the kitchen counter all night and we ate it for breakfast Saturday morning! Simple and delicious.
Pizza can get really complicated outside Naples, but the traditional pizza is still the most honored in that food centric place: marinara with tomato sauce, oregano and garlic slivers; and margherita with tomato, mozzarella and basil leaves.
Pizza in Tuscany tends to be thin and crunchy, almost cracker-like. This is caused from rolling the dough flat with a rolling pin or a rolling machine, thus destroying all the bubbles formed by the yeast. In Naples and Rome, they punch the dough out or gently stretch it to form it or put it in the pan. This way the bubbles remain and when the pizza hits the hot oven, they expand and give a lovely chewy crust.
In Siena we have ciaccino, a very thin, double-crusted pizza, stuffed with a single slice of ham and a sprinkling of cheese.
When we were in Campania this past September with our culinary group, we ate pizza in two historic locations: Pizzeria Brandi in Naples, which invented the pizza Margherita in 1878 for a visit by the queen of Italy; and Pizza al Metro in Vico Equense, which invented pizza by the meter, or yard. Tell them whatever toppings you want, they make a pizza 3-6 feet long and put the toppings on it at intervals. Everyone gets the pizza they want and it’s served on a long trolley set by the table!
The great local red wine goes perfectly with pizza. Try an aglianico, a primitivo or a simple Chianti. Buon Appetito!

May 18, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Fresh pecorino cheese & new fava beans are heralds of Spring

In Italy, many things are done in old-fashioned ways – growing vegetables, caring for animals, cooking traditional dishes – that inevitably tie the people to the seasons. Spring is a time of renewal and many spring dishes reflect the season. Egg-rich dishes and desserts are a result of an abundance of eggs the chickens lay as the days get warmer and longer. Lamb shows up on menus more often, often with fried spring artichokes. In Tuscany, one of my favorite spring pairings is fresh pecorino, or sheep’s milk cheese, and fresh fava beans – cacio e bacelli in Tuscan dialect – that is the perfect example of how the simplicity of a seasonal dish belies the complexity of nature.

Most of us are far removed from the farm and little nuances of life tied to the land frequently escape and astound us when we learn of them. In the second year I lived in Italy, it came as a revelation to me that in order for a sheep, or any animal, to give milk, it has to have a baby every year. Tuscany is a big producer of pecorino, or sheep’s milk cheese, and I learned the facts of natural cheese making when my favorite farmer, Fabrizio, closed his dairy in the late autumn. He explained to me, as if I was a small child, that in late summer a ram is put in with the sheep to impregnate them; once the ram’s job is done, he’s put back out to pasture until the next year. (When a Tuscan is up to his ears in work he’ll say “I’m busier than a billy goat in September!”) The pregnant sheep are then slowly weaned off of milking, ending altogether in late October or early November, and the dairy is closed for the winter.

In the late winter, the sheep give birth to little white lambs and it’s another harbinger of spring when you see them frolicking in the fields. As you can’t keep every lamb born, many of them are butchered, and the mammas go to milking again.

In a natural setting, where the farmer allows his animals to live as nature intended, fresh cheese – aged less than 30 days – is available only so long as fresh milk can be obtained. The industrial food complex has developed to give us fresh cheese all year round, the natural process is controlled with hormones and a sheep never even sees a billy goat.

When they begin milking the sheep in the spring, the first cheeses made are fresh pecorino – soft, buttery yellow and aged less than a month. Its arrival is welcome after a long winter of eating only aged cheeses. It coincides with the season of new fava beans. Sold still in their furry pods, they were planted in the fall and have ripened with the spring warmth. Cacio e bacelli, the classic pairing that is a perfect example of Tuscans honoring the seasonings.

At the Italian Table we’ve been thrilled to get our hands on both imported fresh pecorino and cases of fresh fava beans and have been making little baked custards with the cheese and serving them with blanched fava beans and fresh thyme from our herb garden!