BUFFALO MOZZARELLA!!!

Paestum

BUFFALO!!

As I’m sure most people reading this blog know, Buffalo Mozzarella (mozzarella di buffala) is one of my favorite foods. I have been to the Paestum area of Italy 3 or 4 times (there are really nice temple ruins as well as good quality Greco-roman replica vases) and have had the mozzarella, but had never seen a buffalo. Mom and I had grown to be a bit suspicious of whether there really WERE any buffalo, or if it was just another Italian way to sucker us into buying something. My office mate, Jason, told me that he'd seen some buffalo, but I wasn't about to take anyone's word for it until I laid my OWN eyes on the animals. Well, last weekend I SAW THE BUFFALO!! My friend Luke was gracious enough to invite me on a group trip to Tenuta Vannulo (http://www.vannulo.it/) right outside the Paestum area. It’s an organic buffalo mozzarella, yogurt, gelato, and milk maker, and we had a great guided tour. Among the group of us who speak Italian, I think we managed to understand at least 85% of what the tour guide was telling us…

So, we were able to see through a glass window how they make the mozzarella by pulling and reshaping it multiple times. The guys stick their hands (no, Mom, they don't use gloves. As if that's a big surprise) in this scalding hot vat of water to get out the globs, put them in another vat, then re-transfer them to the original vat... it's all very confusing and labor intensive! They use the final glob to make a braided mozzarella, as apparently it’s a bit tougher than the earlier pieces. And OF COURSE, free samples per tutti!…

The best part (well, besides eating mozzarella and gelato) was seeing the buffalo. They live in a sort of large open metal shack, and are milked for about 265 days per year. The rest of the time they’re let out into the fields on the property to mill around and more than likely eat grass, I’m assuming. Our lovely tour guide told us that they give all of the buffalo names (which sound much classier in Italian) such as “couch,” (divan) “artichoke,” (carciofo) “Berlusconi” (the prime minister of Italy), and we were informed, however, that they don’t have an “Obama” yet, much to our surprise.

One of the buffalo had just given birth two hours before we had arrived, so we were able to see a baby buffalo as well (it was about the size of a full-grown Labrador, so not so “baby,” really).

During the tour, our guide showed us an old stool that the milkers would use back in the day… they would strap it around their waist and go from buffalo to buffalo, squat, get up, next, squat, get up….

But the most interesting thing we learned about was the milking machines. They’ve started the newer buffalo on this machine that looks fairly similar to a small car wash (the older buffalo prefer the hand milking method, apparently!). All the buffalo have a necklace with a microchip in it that the milking machine apparatus is able to read. They are milked at most three times per day, and the buffalo are allowed to just wander over to the machine when they want and get milked. If they’ve already done their three times per day, the machine diverts them out, and won’t let them be milked again. The machine is able to keep track of how much milk was given by that buffalo, when they were last milked, what teat was last milked, etc. It was quite amazing. After each buffalo, the machine self-cleans, and then permits the next buffalo to enter. If the machine senses there is something wrong with the milk, it does not dump it in with the good milk, it funnels it out, and the sick buffalo is corralled into a sort of infirmary area so it can be taken care of. One wouldn’t think the buffalo would be lining up to get milked, but there were several buffalo traffic jams when we were there – we couldn’t believe it!

But the funniest part of the day was one particular buffalo… In the corral area they had two sort of car wash scrubbers where the buffalo could scratch their itches. One particular buffal was just goin’ to town on one of the scrubbers and wouldn’t let any of the other buffalo take a turn. Every few minutes another buffalo would try and get in on the action, but this one buffalo was having none of it. Either he’s totally selfish, or he really had a lot of itches to scratch…

We ended the day with a great meal and a stroll around Paestum (then a big nap later)!