Laverstoke Park Farm Buffalo Mozzarella

I really didn’t think it was possible to get excited about mozzarella.

An ashed chevre, a gooey vacherin or a wedge of pungent stilton. These are cheeses to get excited about, cheeses with soul, cheeses that will happily slap you round the cheeks, badmouth your siblings and shout obscenities on the way down.

But mozzarella? It has always been something to melt onto a margarita or serve up with a few slices of tomato and some hastily torn basil leaves to create a half-arsed salad. It’s a cheese that might make you a cup of sweet tea whilst showing you a slideshow of their recent trip to the Cotswolds.

Those stringy balls of non-descript, lacklustre cheese suspended, implant like, in saline solution gradually hardening into inedibility? Not worthy of praise. They are barely worthy of pizza.

It might melt into gratifyingly long strings that somehow manage to break just before you run out of arm. And, granted, it can carry other flavours and act as a vehicle for herbs, olive oil or black pepper. But I would never have considered that it could stand on its own and just be, well, a cheese.

Until yesterday.

The luxurious life of a freelance food writer

As I mentioned, I was invited to the official launch of Laverstoke Park Farm’s latest product: a truly British mozzarella made from the milk of free-range water buffalo that graze happily on the Hampshire grasslands of Jody Scheckter’s organic and bio-dynamic farm.


Photo courtesy of Cristian Barnett

Apparently, the secret to good mozzarella is freshness. By the time we pluck it from its salty bath it will be at least a week old. And that’s assuming we have access to a good quality deli. God only knows how long those cosmetic surgery bags that supermarkets manage to pass off as mozzarella have been sat there.

But the fresh stuff is something else. It needs no adornments, no additions, no added extras like oil or pepper. It really is good enough to bite right into to enjoy the unique burst of freshness.


Photo courtesy of Cristian Barnett

The flavour is both gentle and rich, subtle and acidic, soft yet cheeky, without being intrusive and manages to coat and cleanse the palate concurrently.

This cheese wouldn’t make you a cup of sweet tea: it would mix a perfect martini then invite you up for coffee.

In short, it is just really, really good and sure to cause a few ripples in a nation that has grown used to the insipid balls of plasticy pap that float around like the eggs of some bizarre sea creature dreamt up by Jules Verne on a bad day.

Fancy trying it yourself? Just go to the Laverstoke Park Online Farm Shop where you can order it to be delivered straight to your door. And treat yourself to some buffalo steaks while you’re at it – they are as good as, if not better than, the best beef I’ve ever tasted.

Sometimes it pays to be a food blogger.

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