Mozzarella di bufala

People here take their mozzarella, from water buffalo milk (mozzarella di bufala), seriously. At lunch one day at a neighborhood place we were told that it would be a wait for pizza as the husband was still out getting the day's fresh batch of the cheese. Their pride is justified.

In the area north of Agropoli in the wide valley of the Sele River water buffalo have been part of the landscape for some 100s of years. One farm, Tenuta Vannulo, has tidied itself up beautifully as a tourist attraction as well as a producer.







There's a large covered stable where the buffalo are fed and milked and, we were told, serenaded with classical music in the mornings. Eight happy bulls mingle freely among the cows.

The silage has a sweet, tasty, fermented scent and the buffalo seem perfectly happy to accept a scratch on the head while they munch.



The cows have collars with chips that ID them as they take themselves to the automatic milking machine; the machine has a sight for finding the teats and can analyse the milk as it comes out of the cow.








They get an occasional cooling drench from some sprinklers.





They can doze in puppy piles if they don't want to bother finding their individual stalls.





Or they can head over to this machine for a massage:



The buffalo in the stable did seem, to our amateur eyes, to be content, if not outright cheerful, but we also got to see a herd of them released to surrounding pasture and these, like kids at recess, actually scampered into the grass, leaping and kicking, which is quite something to see in a water buffalo. Here they settle down in the greenery:



In this pasture there's a waterhole, center and left--you maybe can make out the backs of the submerged buffalo:



The farm has a small, busy shop for the mozzarella, which they sell only on the premises. You can look through big windows into the kitchens and for guided visitors they demonstrate braiding the cheese and tearing it by hand into the regulation sizes, mozzarelle, bocconcini, ciliegine. They also sell leather goods made in an onsite workshop. The leather comes from Tuscany; I think they send their old animals and their baby bulls for processing there? Most glorious, there's a shop for coffee, gelato, yogurt, cake with custard sauces, cannoli and more, all featuring buffalo milk. I should have grabbed pix but I was too distracted by the goodies.

And beyond all that there's a very nice restaurant. On our first visit (okay, so I went three times) we thought for sure there must be a place to taste the mozzarella, so I marched us like our own little herd of buffalo into this elegant restaurant, nearly empty at the time, unaware that it only serves lunch, only by reservation. The supremely professional waiter handled us with flair and courtesy, never a murmur that we might be out of line, and laid out a table with cloth napkins, wine glasses, tomato salads, breads, butters, and formal servings of two sizes of mozzarella and slices of ricotta besides. I was too embarrassed not to clean my plate and walked out of there with a mozzarrella-shaped belly, I swear--but happy!

A guided tour ends with a simpler tasting: