CHEESE

Nothing equals pure, white, fresh mozzarella

BY LAUREN CHAPIN

McClatchy News Service

DAVID EULITT / KANSAS CITY STAR/MCT

Tomatoes and slices of fresh mozzarella make excellent partners, as in this Caprese salad.

• Recipe: Caprese Salad
• Online-Only Recipe: Simple Polenta With Sauteed Cherry Tomatoes and Fresh Mozzarella

MOZZARELLA SPEAK

Cow's milk mozzarella is called fior di latte, flower of the milk.

Ovolini is a small oval.

Bocconcini is the lovely sounding name for bite-size balls of mozzarella.

Pasta filata is the process for making mozzarella. The curds are heated in water until they begin to form strings and become stretchy.

Pizza Margherita, created for Queen Margherita of Italy in 1889, is one of the most popular pizzas in Italy. It's a simple pie: fresh mozzarella, tomatoes and fresh basil.

With his hands sheathed in six pairs of latex gloves and immersed in steaming hot water, Ryan Sciara is playing with his food.

Sciara, the managing partner of Cellar Rat wine shop in the Kansas City, Mo., area, is making fresh mozzarella, squishing and squeezing crumbles of cream-colored, whole milk mozzarella curd until they transform, magically, into snowy globes of fresh mozzarella.

At the height of fresh tomato season, he was making 40 pounds a week.

By most accounts, mozzarella has been made for more than 300 years from water buffalo milk, primarily in the Puglia region of Italy. The milk from the lumbering beasts, originally imported from India, has a butterfat content of 9 percent. Traditionally, the cheese is made in the morning -- and meant to be consumed the same day.

By contrast, the stuff Americans have come to know as mozzarella was stringy, rubbery stuff typically found on pizza. If mozzarella was anywhere to be found on grocery shelves, it was usually yellow and chewy, with a scary-long shelf-life.

But a couple of years ago fresh mozzarella started showing up on regional Italian restaurant menus at places like Joe Avelluto's Il Trullo in Overland Park, Kan. Avelluto buys 20-pound blocks of curd from his supplier, taking pains to carefully chop the curd into uniform squares, which helps ensure the finished product will have the proper elasticity.

Avelluto learned to make mozzarella from his father, Joe Sr., who learned to make it from family in Italy.

''It's a generational thing,'' he says.

The taste of fresh mozzarella is slightly sweet and just a little bit salty, with a pleasing yeasty finish. There's a little give in the texture while the color is clean, pure white. One bite of the real stuff, and you'll never buy the mass-produced stuff.

For Sciara, the best part of cheese-making is ``when we send out an e-mail saying we're making mozzarella, people just show up.''