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Puglia Quotes

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Puglia Quotes

“At first glance, the main display case at Dicecca today looks like a selection you'll find in any cheese shop in Puglia: tubs of milky water covering hunks of mozzarella in its many guises; strings of swollen scamorze dangling from the ceiling, bronzed by their stopover in the cold smoker; small plastic containers of creamy ricotta ready to be stuffed or eaten straight with a spoon. But look closer and you'll see some unfamiliar faces staring back at you through the glass: a large bucket brimming with ricotta spiked with ribbons of blue cheese and toasted almonds, served by the scoop; a wooden serving board paved with melting slabs of goat cheese weaponized with a cloak of bright red chili flakes; a hulking wheel of pecorino, stained shamrock green by a puree of basil and spinach. These are the signs of a caseificio in the grips of an evolution, one that started more than a decade ago when the brothers took the reins from their parents and began to expand the definition of a small, family-run cheese shop.”

VarietyItalyCheesesPuglia
Book:Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture
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“Real burrata is a creation of arresting beauty- white and unblemished on the surface, with a swollen belly and a pleated top. The outer skin should be taut and resistant, while the center should give ever so slightly with gentle prodding. Look at the seam on top: As with mozzarella, it should be rough, imperfect, the sign of human hands at work. Cut into the bulge, and the deposit of fresh cream and mozzarella morsels seems to exhale across the plate. The richness of the cream- burrata comes from burro, the Italian word for "butter"- coats the mouth, the morsels of mozzarella detonate one by one like little depth charges, and the entire package pulses with a gentle current of acidity. The brothers, of course, like to put their own spin on burrata. Sometimes that means mixing cubes of fresh mango into its heart. Or Spanish anchovies. Even caviar. Today, Paolo sends me next door to a vegetable stand to buy wild arugula, which he chops and combines with olives and chunks of tuna and stirs into the liquid heart of the burrata, so that each bite registers in waves: sharp, salty, fishy, creamy. It doesn't move me the same way the pure stuff does, but if I lived on a daily diet of burrata, as so many Dicecca customers do, I'd probably welcome a little surprise in the package from time to time. While the Diceccas experiment with what they can put into burrata, the rest of the world rushes to find the next food to put it onto. Don't believe me? According to Yelp, 1,800 restaurants in New York currently serve burrata. In Barcelona, more than 500 businesses have added it to the menu. Burrata burgers, burrata pizza, burrata mac and cheese. Burrata avocado toasts. Burrata kale salads. It's the perfect food for the globalized palate: neutral enough to fit into anything, delicious enough to improve anything.”

CheeseFlavorsPopularTastesExperimentingPugliaBurrata
Book:Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture
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“In the side refrigerators, where Vito so carefully arranges the morning's new attractions, you'll find even more examples of a traditional caseificio gone rogue: a wheel of aged goat cheese coated in a rough armor of wild herbs; a thick, blue-veined goat cheese soaked red with purple with Primitivo wine; goat yogurt in half a dozen international flavors. You won't be surprised to find that the early efforts of the Dicecca boys were met with opposition- both from the family and the regular clientele. Each brother has a story about the resistance he has encountered along the way- the parental eye rolling at the cacao-coated goat cheese, the sisterly skepticism about mango-stuffed burrata, the customers' confusion at the latest experiment to emerge from the lactic laboratory in back. Every story ends the same way: with one or all of the family members doubting the viability of another esoteric cheese, followed by the long, slow acceptance by enough customers to justify its real estate space in the display case. "When I started making cheese with the Nikka barrel, they made fun of me, said I was destroying the taste of the cheese. Now they're copying me. That's the pattern we always see: at first they make fun, then they start to copy.”

FlavorsCheesesExperimentingPuglia
Book:Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture
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