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By Cinda Chavich
(Vancouver Island) - The orb of pristine white cheese in Paul Sutter’s hand is soft and shiny, the picture of youth in the cheese world.
“It’s very delicate at this point,” says the Courtenay cheese maker, cradling the day-old mozzarella in his palm like an oversized poached egg.
This Canadian-made mozzarella is like any good ball of fresh Italian bocconcini. It’s moist on the inside, with the typical striated layers created by stretching the warmed mass of freshly coagulated curds, encased in a tight, thin skin, formed when the cheese is pulled and hand-pinched into a neat round ball.
And like the original – the famed Mozzarella di Bufala Campana – this homegrown mozzarella is made from buffalo milk, a dense, sweet, high fat milk that creates the finest fresh cheeses.It’s milk from Darrel and Anthea Archer’s Fairburn Farm in British Columbia’s Cowichan Valley, the only river water buffalo dairy in Canada. With the help the artisan cheesemakers at Natural Pastures Cheese Company, they’ve just begun to produce the country’s first authentic, fresh buffalo mozzarella cheese.
But it’s been a long and difficult journey, from the Archer’s first 19 imported water buffalo in 2000 to the unripened Mozzarella di Bufala Fairburn on my plate.
Like the old song goes, they’ve literally skated through a buffalo herd full of government regulations, intransigent health inspectors, legal battles, cheese making challenges and other obstacles to get their cheese to market. But the bumpy route has finally led to a happily symbiotic partnership between the devoted organic dairy farmers, a chef and slow food advocate, and an award-winning island cheese maker, creating Canada’s first authentic buffalo milk mozzarella and a food-lover’s retreat to showcase it.
You’ll find Fairburn Farm at the end of a winding rural road in the Cowichan Valley, just north of Victoria. Darrel Archer’s pioneering parents bought the century-old farm – with its sprawling farmhouse and collection of weathered outbuildings – in 1954. By 1955 they were organic farmers and formed the Vancouver Island Organic Co-operative, the first organic co-op in Canada.
When Darrel and his British-born wife Anthea took over the farm, they tried raising sheep and dairy cows, but wanted something different.
“I read a little article in a John Deere magazine about a water buffalo dairy herd in Northern Devon, so we went to England in 1998, and met Robert Palmer who had been raising them for 16 years,” says Darrel Archer. Mr. Palmer helped them secure a herd of the animals from Bulgaria, which were quarantined in Denmark before arriving at Fairburn Farm in early 2000.
A month later BSE (mad cow disease) was discovered in a single dairy cow in Denmark. While the Archer’s water buffalo had had no contact with that cow – or that farm – the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) ordered the Archers to destroy their animals. After a long legal battle – which saw many other farmers, individuals and chefs raise $75,000 for the Archers’ legal defense – the case was lost and the original 19 buffalo were killed, and subsequently tested for BSE.
“It’s very delicate at this point,” says the Courtenay cheese maker, cradling the day-old mozzarella in his palm like an oversized poached egg.
This Canadian-made mozzarella is like any good ball of fresh Italian bocconcini. It’s moist on the inside, with the typical striated layers created by stretching the warmed mass of freshly coagulated curds, encased in a tight, thin skin, formed when the cheese is pulled and hand-pinched into a neat round ball.
And like the original – the famed Mozzarella di Bufala Campana – this homegrown mozzarella is made from buffalo milk, a dense, sweet, high fat milk that creates the finest fresh cheeses.It’s milk from Darrel and Anthea Archer’s Fairburn Farm in British Columbia’s Cowichan Valley, the only river water buffalo dairy in Canada. With the help the artisan cheesemakers at Natural Pastures Cheese Company, they’ve just begun to produce the country’s first authentic, fresh buffalo mozzarella cheese.
But it’s been a long and difficult journey, from the Archer’s first 19 imported water buffalo in 2000 to the unripened Mozzarella di Bufala Fairburn on my plate.
Like the old song goes, they’ve literally skated through a buffalo herd full of government regulations, intransigent health inspectors, legal battles, cheese making challenges and other obstacles to get their cheese to market. But the bumpy route has finally led to a happily symbiotic partnership between the devoted organic dairy farmers, a chef and slow food advocate, and an award-winning island cheese maker, creating Canada’s first authentic buffalo milk mozzarella and a food-lover’s retreat to showcase it.
When Darrel and his British-born wife Anthea took over the farm, they tried raising sheep and dairy cows, but wanted something different.
“I read a little article in a John Deere magazine about a water buffalo dairy herd in Northern Devon, so we went to England in 1998, and met Robert Palmer who had been raising them for 16 years,” says Darrel Archer. Mr. Palmer helped them secure a herd of the animals from Bulgaria, which were quarantined in Denmark before arriving at Fairburn Farm in early 2000.
A month later BSE (mad cow disease) was discovered in a single dairy cow in Denmark. While the Archer’s water buffalo had had no contact with that cow – or that farm – the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) ordered the Archers to destroy their animals. After a long legal battle – which saw many other farmers, individuals and chefs raise $75,000 for the Archers’ legal defense – the case was lost and the original 19 buffalo were killed, and subsequently tested for BSE.
It’s plain that the Archers love these animals and it’s easy to be smitten by the big, shaggy brown-eyed beasts as you approach their weathered corral. They are timid but curious, and immediately come to the fence to investigate, their fat wet noses held high to catch your scent, and their big ears drooping beneath mops of wavy hair.
They are river buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) originally bred in India for milk production, not the swamp buffalo (Bubalus carabanesis) that are used as draught animals. It’s not uncommon to see the Archers in the corral among the huge horned cows, scratching them behind their floppy ears or rubbing their black bellies.
These days, while the Archers concentrate on milking their buffalo, they have new partners in their farm stay and cheese side of the business. Natural Pastures Cheese Company in Courtney is making the buffalo mozzarella cheese and Mara Jernigan, a chef and local slow food activist, is leasing their sprawling farmhouse and running it as an “agroturismo”, inspired by the farm-based guest houses she has visited in Italy.
With experience working in a buffalo mozzarella dairy in Salerno, Ms. Jernigan also helped Sutter perfect the Natural Pastures Mozzarella di Bufala Fairburn. And now she’s perfecting recipes using the fresh cheese for farm guests.
“I have a beautiful fig tree off the verandah here so I might find a way to use the figs with the cheese,” she muses. “And then there’s ricotta – that’s the natural companion to make with the whey from making the mozzarella. So that might be the next step.”
Of course there are other fresh mozzarella cheeses on the market, but Canadian-made versions of the bite-sized bocconcini, are made from cow’s milk, and the vast majority are turned out by machines and sold days, if not weeks, after they’re made. Authentic Italian mozzarella di bufala is also available in some cheese shops – but by the time it arrives here, the cheese has aged, losing many of the attributes of a fresh product.
Ms. Jernigan also notes that this new Mozzarella di Bufala Fairburn is a small production artisan cheese, designed to be enjoyed fresh in the region where it was made. With only about 15 kg of cheese being produced each week, it’s like a rare wine – now sold only to a few island chefs for their seasonal menus and supplied to the Fairburn Farm kitchens. But Natural Pastures will also sell the cheese from their own outlet in Courtenay, and some cheese has already found its way to Les Amis du Fromage, a cheese shop in Vancouver, which can ship cheese to customers within the province.
With a batch of new calves on the farm, the milk supply will be limited this summer but by the fall, when new calves are weaned and milk production peaks at about 125 litres a day, there will be much more cheese available for sale.
The Archers are milking 28 cows now and plan to build the dairy herd to 60 animals. Unlike regular milking cows, water buffalo can provide milk for up to 20 years. Now that they have successfully steered their way through a buffalo herd-ful of challenges, islanders should have fresh Mozzarella di Bufala Fairburn for their tomato and bocconcini salads for many seasons to come.
“Artisinal foods like these come from the land and are dictated by the seasons,”
says Ms. Jernigan. “The caprese salad should only be made in August when the tomatoes are perfect anyway.”
(This feature first appeared in the Globe and Mail newspaper, summer 2007)
©Cinda Chavich 2007
INGREDIENT: CANADIAN MOZZARELLA DI BUFALA
The journey from water buffalo to milk, and now Canada’s first authentic buffalo mozzarella, was difficult but rewarding.
photos by Cinda Chavich
