In these long years, I have written several books. All of them addressing the passionate theme of cheeses... And, today, I found myself restless and thoughtful with the interesting mission of presenting my book about Mozzarella, a cheese that has become universal, but, even so, does not carry within itself the poetic aura that is so visible around Roquefort, Camembert, Parmigiano-Reggiano and other hard cheeses from high varieties and long European strains...
However, a careless look at the filament, at these laborious hands, does not reveal much about the wonders that take place in the core and depths of this contorted and twisted mass, drowned in boiling and vaporous waters... Our shallow eyes, so human and Cartesians, couldn't even see those pale casein fibers lazily aligning themselves and slowly lining up, in parallels of infinite platitudes and amplitudes...
Can you imagine billions of calcium molecules? Some, somewhat lost searching for their chemical identity, without knowing whether they are ionic and, if so... whether they are cationic or anionic, amid threatening buffers and disdainful lactates... And, even worse, others revealing themselves to be molecules bewildered in a permanent colloidal state, without threshing floor or edge in that world where having a charge means having bonds and bonds of great and serious covalence...
Yes, with mysterious touches of chemistry, biochemistry and that musty alchemy, whirlwinds of things continue to happen while the Mozzarella gives itself hopelessly to its fateful fate of being boiled, stretched, balled up, kneaded and stretched again and twisted into endless threads and tortuous purposes... Can you close your eyes and imagine the corrosive lactic acid in its quest to hunt down fat paracaseinates and, mercilessly, strip them of their scarce mineral resources and, even, abandon them through the metabolic pathways completely demineralized... ? And there he goes, acidic and facetious, in sinful embraces with the rubicund pH, which has been descending with sourness on all things, displacing protons here and conjugated bases there, while he moves triumphantly in constant dissociation through the curves of fermentation. .
Well... these simple Mozzarellas are not arrogant like an ancient Parmigiano from Regia Emilia, or like those impassive Danbos, descendants of the brave Vikings of the North Seas... Mozzarella was born humble in the Italian boot, close to Naples, listening roars and sighs of the temperamental and grumpy Vesuvius and, without much exuberance, he sneaked among the hordes in peninsular transhumance and, in a kind of clumsy caseolithic diaspora, conquered the world and fell into favor with creative people. piz-zaiolos, its companions in worldly banishment and exile... It became, without dreams and lost in chimeras, a universal cheese, even if stripped of pedigrees of high ancestry or emblematic coats of arms of proud nobility...
This is the old, ancient, sung and decanted Mozzarella, which, today, today, I come to present to you... Stripped of titles, poor in enchantments, without chords of pompous melodies... But, full of functions and functionalities ... supporting role in our lives, protagonist of our pizzas... If the cheesemaking tradition was its stepmother, it has become the stepdaughter that all cheesemakers adopt and all pizza makers wrap in fragrant oregano... If it was necessary before , now a global character, has gained worldwide importance and has become indispensable, the sovereign old lady of our daily dairy culture...