Along with cheddar, mozzarella is probably one of the most widely eaten cheeses in North America, if not the world. It’s found in almost everything. Partly, that’s because it is such a mild, pleasant cheese that nearly everyone likes it. But mozzarella also has a wonderful set of qualities that make it useful in loads of cooking situations: It’s firm enough to hold its shape and to cut or to grate; It’s stringy and can be pulled apart; And it’s a great melter, if you want to put it on, oh, I dunno — pizza.
But for this week’s Cheese of the Week, we didn’t just want to pick up some random grocery store cheap mozza. Instead, we were struck by the care and apparent authenticity of this cheese, which was billed as “natural cheese in its own milk.”
Peeling back the packaging revealed a wet-coated cheese that, indeed, spelled fresh. I mean that in a good way. It had a bright, milk-like smell, if you could say it had a smell at all. There wasn’t really all that much whey in the package, just enough to keep the cheese moist, and it wasn’t at all slimy.
Fresh mozzarella, combined with the fresh spring air outside, and the fact that we had some delicious tomatoes that needed to be used up, made our next step obvious: caprese salad. One of the simplest recipes we know, a caprese salad is simply cut-up mozzarella slices alternated on a plate with tomato slices and drizzled with balsamic vinegar. We also like to add a little salt and pepper, some basil, and a little olive oil to the dressing.
Cutting the mozzarella was actually more difficult than I had expected, even with an ultra-sharp, nearly brand-new knife. This cheese was firm and spongy, and it required a fair bit of force to cut through the striations that are natural to mozzarella.
A few snacks along the way worried us that this mozzarella was maybe a little too mild, too fresh — it verged on flavourless. It was too much skim milk, not enough cream, I commented. Amy said she preferred saltier mozza (but Amy prefers everything with additional salt).
It sure was a good-looking cheese, though — quite white, but with enough colour to it that it didn’t look washed-out or bleached. Paired with bright red tomatoes, drizzled with oil and balsamic, then spiced, it looked amazing.
I picked up one of the pieces to see how it stood, on its own. You could peel it apart, almost like one of those “Cheese Heads” string cheese sticks, if you picked at it enough, but biting into it, it had a classic mozzarella give — almost like a very firm gelatin — before your teeth cut through.
Although very, very, very mild, this cheese actually worked really well when paired with a fresh tomato and a ton of spices, plus vinegar. I had worried that the sharp vinegar, the salt and the very tomato-y tomato that we had might overwhelm this poor cheese, but it’s almost as if the humble mozzarella craved a little bit of competition.
The salt and the balsamic really brought out the natural mozzarella flavour, and we found that this cheese was an excellent neutral base on which to accentuate the rest of the ingredients.
Yum! Delicious! This salad did not last long.
If we had had to try this mozzarella on its own, perhaps with soda crackers, we probably would have been disappointed. If we had bought this mozzarella to shred it for pizza, or to melt it on toast, we probably wouldn’t have cared much for it.
This fresh, still-in-its-own-milk mozzarella deserves something a little sprightlier. It deserves something like a caprese salad. And there, it shines.
