The best burrata in the world

It’s 5000 miles from Matera to MOMA in Midtown Manhattan, plus several more storeys up to Terrace 5, where burrata’s on the menu to feed the art lover. Up here above West 53rd Street, where the presence of Monet’s Water Lilies dictates you can’t fry steak or boil pasta – those pesky paintings are so sensitive – American Burrata takes the place of the Italian original, among the healthy salads, the ramps and beets, the heritage this and organic that. It’s from Maplebrook Farm in Vermont, slightly closer than Matera.

I was out the day burrata became a thing. I often am. I’m not sure if it’s still a thing, but I do know that suddenly “mozzarella” became “burrata” in upscale menus everywhere. I peered sullenly at plates bearing a fake green leaf and a rubbery puck and wanted to know where the silky, semi-liquid, salty/sweet creamy sensation I had first eaten in Puglia had gone. “Where’s your burrata from?” I’d ask, hopefully, only to be shot a look that said “fridge” or at best, “the deli”.

Puglia is reborn, and not just because Angela Hartnett’s Nona says so

Don’t get me wrong. Maplebrook Farm’s burrata is very nice. But as I cut through mine with a knife, it was impossible not to be reminded of the original I’d had to eat with a spoon. That was in Matera, Puglia, aka Apulia, the “heel” of Italy, where a great monster has arisen blinking, waking up from the dead. No longer just Italy’s biggest producer of industrial strength grape juice for processing into €1 vini, no longer the behemoth of olive production for all that anonymous oil, Puglia is reborn, and not just because Angela Hartnett’s Nona says so. Now there’s agriturismo and sixth generation producers doing limited-edition short run estate bottled single grape Negroamaro (coming soon to a liquor store or offie near you). They understand that the first cold pressing of olives makes for oil wealth that has Texans blinking in wonder.

And they have burrata. It’s theirs, capiche?

Matera is, to say the least, an odd place. It consists mainly of caves, which include, rather charmingly, a hotel that seems to have burrowed into the rock face. It’s got wifi in the lobby, rough stone walls, and friendly troglodytes next door (people hereabouts actually live in the caves).

They make cheese too.

It is succulent, sensuous, and voluptuous. It does not require adornment

Burrata is basically mozzarella stuffed with leftover mozzarella bits and cream. As you can probably tell, I don’t write food catalogues, but the best burrata – to people like me, who’ve disobeyed their doctors’ health advice all their lives – is, on first tasting, actual nectar from whatever atheist heaven is. It is made from the milk of the water buffalo and is thus purest white. (Cow’s milk can be used, as it is widely across America, but the result is slightly yellowish). It starts with the rennet, which seduces and curdles warmed milk. Instead of being kneaded and shaped into its more familiar blobs, a pouch is created and stuffed, then wrapped in asphodel leaves, from the famous lilies that Alexander Pope claimed bloomed in Homer’s Elysian Fields. Those leaves indicate freshness by remaining green, since burrata should be consumed within 24 hours, 48 at most.

To stand in a cheesemaker’s shop and eat fresh burrata with a spoon in Matera, or Giola del Colle, or Modugno, or Martina Franca south of Bari, is the closest I’ll ever get to sex with Sophia Loren. It is succulent, sensuous, and voluptuous. It does not require adornment: possibly a smidgen of dressing, maybe some underpinning, a lacy sliver of sharp fruity tomato. And a spoon. Its inner creaminess flows when the pouch is torn open; it cannot be eaten without one.

Like most regional specialities, the development of burrata came from economic parsimony and the need to use up all the bits and pieces left over from straight mozzarella production. It’s the same principle that lies behind potato skins, or the ingredients for fish pie in Sainsbury’s. In truth, burrata has mostly been made in factories and really only dates back less than a hundred years – not quite as historic, or sexy, as we imagine. But now it’s in the hands of artisans and has become a svelte, luxurious commodity.

On a Slow Food tour of Bari, I stood in a daze outside a cheesemaker’s, wondering in dribbling awe at the airy texture of a featherlight ricotta and the sweet sexuality of the burrata we were tasting. The guy who made it looked like Puglia’s only hipster (until Alex James gave up Blur for cheese I thought everyone who made the stuff was a white-coated extra from Wallace and Gromit) and when I asked him if I could get his product in London, he laughed out loud in derision.

“Rome?”

He snorted.

“Where then?”

“Anywhere within twenty minutes from here. It doesn’t travel. We make it early. People have it for breakfast, sometimes lunch. There’s never any left for dinner.”

But we live in the modern world, not caves, and we have jets; north Atlantic tuna can be sold in Tokyo’s Tsukiji market within 24 hours, and certainly London has two shops – a guy in Borough Market (natch) and il Trullo dei Sapori in Notting Hill – who profess to sell the real thing.

But it was at Babbo, in London’s Albemarle Street, that I sat eating my burrata with a spoon, trying not to share it with my colleague, because Napoli chef Carlo Scotto gets it twice a week from apulia – Corato, outside Bari, to be exact – and serves it simply on a thin lacy slice of ripe tomato, with a little drizzle of oil. It’s the real thing. It’s outstandingly fresh, served as part of a Mayfair version of homemade Italian cuisine, within a menu of flavours and colours (stuffed courgette flowers, savoy cabbage risotto, formaggi con mostarde) that satisfies the demand for authenticity. Even though Mayfair is still a thousand miles from Matera. C

babborestaurant.co.uk