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Reader Ronal Ellison wrote in asking if we could provide some background and history for Puglia's burrata, a trendy, decadent, cream-filled variation on traditional mozzarella — at once a simple peasant treat and an unctuous extravagance. There's curiously little in print on the subject. A search on Lexis-Nexis, an online database of articles published in the past thirty years, found hundreds of mentions, but most were nothing more than a few words in reviews of upscale restaurants that served the cheese.

As with other mozzarellas, burrata owes its existence to the water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), a large beast that was brought to Italy from its native Asia sometime in the fifteenth century. Water buffalos' milk is richer and higher in protein than that of cows, yielding 1.6 times more cheese. It also lacks the yellow pigment carotene found in cow's milk, so mozzarella di bufala is pure white. Although mozzarella was originally made with the milk of water buffaloes, and the best still is (in Italy, the legal name for cow's-milk "mozzarella," is fior di latte), most American mozzarella is now made from cow's milk.

Burrata, Italian for "buttery," was first made around 1920 on the Bianchini farm in the town of Andria, about two-thirds of the way up from Italy's heel to the spur of Apulia. In the 1950s, it became more widely available after some of the local cheese factories, notably Chieppa, began producing it. Silvestro Silvestori, who runs the cooking school Awaiting Table in the town of Lecce (on the southernmost portion of the Apulian heel), suspects that factories were interested in it because it was a way to utilize the ritagli ("scraps" or "rags") of mozzarella. But he commented that there are only leftover scraps in large-scale operations; when these cheeses are formed by hand, there isn't much waste. This artisanal cheese kept its premium-product status even after it began to be made in a number of factories from Andria, Bari, Gioia del Colle, Modugno, all the way to Martina Franca, an eighty-mile stretch of Puglia.

So just how is burrata made? Let's start with mozzarella, which begins like other cheeses, with rennet used to curdle the warm milk. But then, unlike other cheeses, fresh mozzarella curds are plunged into hot whey or lightly salted water, kneaded and pulled to develop the familiar stretchy strings (pasta filata), then shaped in whatever form is desired.

When making burrata, the still-hot cheese is formed into a pouch, which is then filled with scraps of leftover mozzarella and topped off with fresh cream (panna) before closing. The finished burrata is traditionally wrapped in the leaves of asphodel (yes, these are the lilies that Alexander Pope said bloomed "in ever-flowing meads" in Homer's Elysian fields), tied to form a little brioche-like topknot, and moistened with a little whey. For the sake of convenience, these days the cheese is often placed in polietilene, a plastic bag. The asphodel leaves, if used, should still be green when the cheese is served, to indicate the cheese's freshness.

When the burrata is sliced open, its ritagli-thickened panna flows out. The cheese has a wonderfully rich, buttery flavor, and yet retains its fresh milkiness. It's best when eaten within twenty-four hours, and certainly should be consumed within forty-eight. Consequently, it's only in recent years that burrata has traveled outside of Andria, let alone its native Apulia. That is, of course, except for the very rich: The Shah of Iran used to fly it in for special occasions. There is, however, a producer of high-quality burrata in the United States: the Gioia Cheese Company, owned and operated by Vito Girardy, a native of Bari who opened the California factory in 1992.

Silvestori says that in Lecce, just sixty miles below Martina Franca, "Burrata is as foreign as brie." Very often, for Italians, dishes from the next town are "foreign food," and burrata may be better known in the United States than it is in parts of Italy outside the area in which it's produced.

Nancy Harmon Jenkins suggested that burrata may be what she calls an "invented tradition," and this may provide a clue to the relative scarcity of reliable information about the cheese. Since these cheeses are marketed in places far from their source, their reputation as artisanal treasures — produced on family farms in a rustic and unspoiled part of Italy — might be diminished by mentioning their association with factories. This may seem trivial considering how delicious these cheeses actually are, but much of our appreciation of the foods we enjoy is based on what we imagine about them, and marketers are very reluctant to allow mere facts to interfere with what we think we know about the foods we love.

Acknowledgements, References, and a Source
This article could not have been written without the much-appreciated assistance of Nancy Harmon Jenkins, Janice Mancuso, Silvestro Silvestori, and Clifford Wright — molto grazie a tutti.

Davidson, Alan. The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Gioia Cheese Company
1605 Potrero Avenue
South El Monte, California 91733
(626) 444-6015

Gosetti, Fernanda. Il Grande Dizionario dei Formaggi. Milan: Istituto Geografico de Agostino, 1989.

La Burrata

Le Vie del Latte

edible tales: Oh Gioia!