The south Pontino and its buffalo mozzarella cheese

The real buffalo mozzarella is difficult to commercialize within big distribution systems because the lacks of a large scale production. This truly amazing mozzarella offers a fresh, moist and but mouth-watering taste fresh cheese with a rather soft and slightly chewy consistency. Nevertheless, it is virtually unknown in comparison to its much more globally-known cousin, America's beloved "string cheese, the mozzarella found on Pizza Hut and MacDonald".

                    Buffaloes

But very differently from its dry, fibrous and somewhat bland standardized American replica, buffalo mozzarella is so juicy that from its very first slice, milky drops of rich buffalo milk appear on the surface, releasing a fairly sweet aroma. This much copied but never really industrially cloned treasure is a fresh, daily-produced and consumed cheese made from whole or high percentage of buffalo's milk. It presents itself mainly in the traditional spherical in shape of different weight and size. Each inviting ball has a very thin silky-smooth edible skin is of a pearly, porcelain-white in color. As regards to its production process, the buffalo whole milk arrives from carefully selected buffalo breeding and then is filtered in order to remove all impurities, before its final processing.

In many small and medium-size factories it is still shaped by hand, by “breaking” with the index finger and the thumb the dough obtained by the final process of buffalo milk blending and heating. Regardless of the quantity is sold in vacuum-packed and always in its own brine filled air-sealed plastic bag. Traditional buffalo mozzarella production requires the knowledge of a secular expertise which is very localized in few selected areas of Southern Italy. To these days it is commonly known that the best and best high-quality produced buffalo mozzarella is still found in the region of Naples near Caserta, Battipaglia and Salerno where small factories continue centuries-old traditions making buffalo mozzarella fresh daily for their local customers who line up at the factories to buy the freshly made delicacy. Nevertheless good quality buffalo milk and mozzarella can be found in other areas other than these traditional ones.

There are few localities close to the town of Foggia in the Apulia region and here in the countryside and marshlands of South Pontino in Lazio. The queen of the cheeses is now a specialty here in Pontino and certainly deserves its own space and honors. Like the local extra virgin olive oil the Pontine buffalo mozzarella is a product with the “denomination of protected origin” (DOP). Because originally mozzarella was not made from pasteurized milk and because at the time there was little or no refrigeration the mozzarella had a very short shelf-life and seldom left the southern region of Italy near Naples where it was made. As cheese technology, refrigeration and transportation systems developed the buffalo mozzarella started to be familiar to other nearby regions of Italy.