ITALY
Italy's Campania region is where fresh mozzarella roams
Near Naples is where you'll find the real thing: silky-soft cheese from unpasteurized buffalo milk. Eat it on its own and, preferably, as soon as you buy it.
The Italian buffalo is a massive beast with eyes that glow red and a bony rump. Resistant to any change in routine, it is happiest wallowing in mud, lying in the pasture like a pile of old leather shoes and poking its wet nose into a mound of feed.
It has nothing in common with Botticelli"s "Primavera" or Donatello's "David." But since the 12th century at least, the brutes have given the world something arguably as good: fresh, pillow-soft, white mozzarella cheese.
Mozzarella comes chiefly from Italy's Campania region around Naples. Although theories abound, no one knows for sure when or how the buffalo first got here from Africa and Asia. Frankly, I don't care as long as my diet regularly includes fresh mozzarella.
My passion for the cheese recently led me on a driving tour to the traditional land of mozzarella. About an hour south of Rome, I turned off the E45 Autostrada at the Caianello exit, got on a country road that seemed headed toward the mountains and eventually found La Fenice, a mozzarella dairy, or caseificio , outside the hamlet of Presenzano.
At the airplane-hangar-like building on a rise in the middle of farm fields, I got my first whiff of buffalo, so rank it could make a shovel stand up on its own. But the little shop in front was ruthlessly clean, its display case heaped with dairy products such as buffalo milk pudding and ricotta.
Then I spied the vat where fresh mozzarella balls bobbed, unrefrigerated, in a sea of viscous liquid.
Mozzarella fact No. 1 : Fresh mozzarella made from unpasteurized buffalo milk does not belong in the refrigerator. It is best kept at room temperature and optimally should be eaten within two days of production.
While I stood there, lone men in city-slicker suits, looking almost guilty, arrived, one after another, for their fixes. I watched the hair-netted clerk scoop cheese baseballs into plastic bags filled with "keeping water," packaged the way pet stores sell goldfish.
I asked for two medium-size mozzarellas, then drove down the road, parked by a pink cherry orchard, leaned out the window and punctured the bag, spurting liquid onto the side of the car. With the cheese slithering in my hands, I took a bite, breaking through the thin, shiny rind into dissolving layers of musky-tasting paradise, juice streaming down my chin. It was not a pretty sight but exactly the way fresh mozzarella should be eaten, with nothing else but the Italian spring.
Mozzarella fact No. 2 : Caprese salad (mozzarella, tomatoes and basil) is delicious, and leftover cheese is fine for cooking. But when purists get their hands on a lump of real, fresh buffalo milk mozzarella, any accompaniment is superfluous.
After that, I drove on to the town of Caserta with its 1,200-room palace built about 1750 by Charles VII of Bourbon, then ruler of the Kingdom of Naples. He was succeeded by his son Ferdinand IV, a monarch who had the soul of a peasant, ate macaroni with his fingers and started a buffalo-breeding farm outside Caserta.
The town is now part of the unbroken urban sprawl that coats the coastal plain north of Mt. Vesuvius, virtually a suburb of Naples, known for crime, litter, poverty, corruption and occasional earthquakes. On the upside, the greater Neapolitan area has Pompeii, Herculaneum, the Bay of Naples and mozzarella-topped pizza Margherita, invented by a local pizza chef for the 1889 visit of Italian Queen Margherita.
Most tourists shoot south as fast as they can from the Naples airport to the Amalfi Coast. But I love the disorderly, densely packed Neapolitan area, where every graffiti-covered factory seems to have a statue of Jesus, large brassieres dry on high-rise apartment balconies and shady-looking men leave their big, black SUVs in no-parking zones. Unlike picture-perfect Tuscany, it's a slice of real life.
I had to stop in Caserta because, together with Salerno about 50 miles south, it is a mozzarella production center, home of a consortium founded in 1981 to protect and promote bona fide, officially regulated mozzarella di bufala Campania.
Mozzarella fact No. 3 : Signs for dairy outlets along the highways in the Naples area are as common as casino marquees on the Vegas Strip. Some sell excellent mozzarella. If you always want to be sure of getting the real thing, look for caseificios bearing the Denominazione d'Origine Protetta, or DOP seal, a European Union certification that guarantees top-quality Campania mozzarella.
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