Buona Mozzarella!

The Via Ritiro N.7 diary is about to complete its first year of life and in this time we have posted precisely 107 stories so about a story every 3 and a half days. Not bad considering that the past month we haven't posted a single thing, however we do have an excellent excuse: we have been busy packing everything and moving to Sicily from the UK for good and changing countries is not the simplest of tasks.

Anyway, back to the central issue. Via Ritiro N.7 is a year old! To celebrate we've given the diary a bit of a facelift, but more importantly with us being permanently here the diary will enter a whole new dimension of its life since stories will be all the easier to follow, photograph and report.

And its precisely in this spirit that we would like to share a discovery that we made just last night, quite by chance in a 'fiera' (a kind of market/exhibition) in Vittoria. The fiera was disappointing to say the least. However, just as we were about to abandon the idea of a bargain we came across the stall of someone selling mozzarella and provolette. Now, discovering mozzarella in Sicily is not exactly a huge surprise. Mozzarella is produced locally. What is surprising was that the stall in question had a huge photo of buffaloes in the back and buffalo mozzarella produced in Sicily is indeed a surprise.

A short discussion with the owner revealed that the Azienda Agricola Magazze was only three months old and had 140 buffaloes producing 40Kg of mozzarella a day, while the demand for the product was closer to 120Kg. The initial advice the owner got was that this was simply a crazy idea, who had ever heard of buffalo mozzarella in Sicily! However, this is a guy who has spent time in Africa and studied tropical environments at university so he was confident that he could make it work.

And indeed it worked fantastically, the mozzarella was absolutely amazing, because beyond the relative novelty of the buffaloes being in Sicily all the other aspects of creating mozzarella were well taken care of. For dinner add some salami from the black pigs of the Nebrodi and a spicy dry sausage, tomatoes with olive oil and oregano and that pretty much takes care of things!