Our taxi driver asks if we have eaten mozzarella. His tone suggests that when our answer is no, he could resolutely refuse to drive us to the airport. Seeing Naples and then dying is an option. Seeing Naples and not eating mozzarella is apparently not. At least, not if it is up to this Napolitan, who, after his somewhat abrupt opening sentence, introduces himself to more pleasant tone as a Carmine. We even visited a Mozzarella maker, as we assure him. And with that we prevent Stante Pede for a Trattoria or Alimentari to be dropped off to first do our homework before we leave the city.
“I know everything about mozzarella,” Carmine continues. “I eat two kilos a day.” Was it my shaky Italian? Or was it the improbability that someone gets two kilos of mozzarella a day? In any case, I don’t think he understands him well and ask if he sometimes means two kilos a week. “A day,” he corrects me, looking at me through his rear -view mirror shaking. “Those are only four balls.” Call me naive, but I can hardly imagine consuming two kilos of cheese a day. With tomatoes and olive oil, I still inform. “No, just out of hand.”
While experiencing himself and with his hand on the horn makes his way through the chaos of Napolitan traffic, Carmine starts a lesson about his beloved fresh cheese. About mozzarella from cow versus buffalic milk and that the latter is by far superior, or rather: the only real one. He tells how there is tampering with the name Buffelmozzarella, and that sometimes only 7 percent buffalo milk goes in while the rest simply consists of much cheaper cow’s milk. “A shame!” And that we should only buy mozzarella di Bufala Campana, and who preferably also have to make a soldier within twenty -four hours, because the cheese per day, what he says, loses quality per
I immediately taste the Bocconcino again, the small ball of mozzarella, which I bought a few days earlier from Tenuta Vannulo. After we had visited the stables of this organic buffalo farm in Paestum and stroked the buffalo over their sweet shiny noses, after we had watched the activity in the ultramodern cheese factory, saw how the curd was kneaded, pulled into long sausages and then cut into large and small bulbs – mozzare Means cut – we had treated ourselves in the farm shop to a few hourly fresh cheeses and those in our rental car, from the bag, melved. It had undoubtedly been the tastiest Mozza I had ever eaten.
“Did you know that you first have to put a bag of mozzarella in a bowl of warm water before you open it,” our taxi driver asks. I had already learned something like that from an Italian friend, but Carmine doesn’t have to know that. “So two kilos a day, isn’t it?” This time there is just a little more admiration than disbelief in my voice. “Yes, but my wife can only do one kilo a day. So if my service is over, I always first drive past the bar for an espresso and two balls.”