Peter Bohler for The New York Times  Water buffalo at Craig Raminiâs farm in Tomales, Calif., 60 miles north of San Francisco.  Buffalo mozzarella is the Great White Whale of American cheesemaking: a dream so exotic and powerful that it drives otherwise sensible people into ruinous monomaniacal quests. Despite all the recent triumphs of our country’s foodie movement (heirloom-turkey-sausage saffron Popsicles; cardamom paprika mayonnaise foam), no one in the United States has, as of yet, figured out how to recreate precisely this relatively simple Old World delicacy — a food with essentially one ingredient (buffalo milk) that is made every day in Italy. Over the last 15 years, in fact, the attempt to make authentic buffalo mozzarella — to nail both its taste and texture — has destroyed businesses from Vermont to Los Angeles. It seems truly doomed. “A Polar wind blows through it,” Melville might have written about it, if he had been a food writer, “and birds of prey hover over it.”  Craig Ramini left a career in Silicon Valley for his rural creamery.  At the risk of straining the analogy, you could call me the Ishmael of this quest.  I do not, normally, have foodie tendencies. I grew up loving tuna casserole covered in potato chips, and roughly two-thirds of my body weight is ketchup. I have never tasted caviar or foie gras. And yet something about buffalo mozzarella calls to me. Ever since I discovered the cheese’s existence, sometime in my 20s, I’ve thought about it, and eaten it, probably more than is good for me. It’s one of the only foods that I’ll order, automatically, whenever I see it on a menu. Once, years ago, apropos of nothing, I made my family take a road trip to visit a buffalo dairy in Vermont — a dairy whose insanely expensive buffalo-milk yogurt I was spending a large portion of my tiny income on. That dairy, inevitably, went out of business several years later, which saved me plenty of money but caused me an equal amount of emotional pain.  If this seems like a lot of hubbub over an obscure variant of a readily available cheese, it is not. Fresh mozzarella di bufala is one of the miracles of Italian cuisine. It’s exactly like regular mozzarella except that it’s made with milk squeezed out of a buffalo — which is a little like saying that the Hope diamond is exactly like a plastic replica of the Hope diamond except that it’s made out of priceless crystallized carbon. Buffalo milk has roughly twice the fat of cow milk, which makes it decadently creamy and flavorful. The good stuff is almost unrealistically soft — it seems like the reason the word “mouthfeel” was invented — with a depth of flavor that makes even the freshest hand-pulled artisanal cow-milk mozzarella taste like glorified string cheese. Buffalo mozzarella is the apotheosis of dairy: the golden mean between yogurt and custard and cottage cheese and heavy cream and ricotta. It lives (along with clouds and mercury and lava and photons and quicksand) on the mystical border between solid and liquid. Descriptions of it tend toward poetry. “When cut,” the cheesemonger Steven Jenkins has written, “it will weep its own whey with a sweet, beckoning, lactic aroma.”  Why, then, is it so impossible to get truly fresh buffalo mozzarella in the United States? Well, there are all kinds of reasons.  Consider, first off, the conditions in Italy, which are basically perfect. Water buffalo have lived in the hills around Naples for around 1,000 years. (To be clear: these are not the big, brown, wild, hairy bison of the American prairies; they’re the smooth, dark, curly-horned beasts you might expect to see in a documentary about rice farming in China.) One Italian cheesemaker told me that the animals first came to Italy when Hannibal used them to carry his war treasure back from Asia — a story that is historically dubious but does manage to capture the cheese’s almost mythic exoticism. After so many centuries of practice, modern Italians have buffalo dairying down to a science: animal genetics, human expertise, farming infrastructure — it’s all in place and perfectly integrated. If you walk into a shop in Naples and ask for mozzarella, you will get a ball of buffalo milk that probably congealed only hours before. (For the vastly inferior cow’s-milk version — the default in American stores — you have to ask by a whole different name: fior di latte.)  Italy is a quintessentially Old World country — a quilt of microregions, each fiercely loyal to its own traditions and cuisines — which means that it’s perfectly natural to expect your cheese to have been made locally that day. This expectation has been woven so deeply into the fabric of daily life, by so many generations of cheese eaters, that the market for it is guaranteed. And Italy is small enough that, if you do move a fresh product from one major city to the next, it takes only a couple of hours.  The conditions in the United States are the opposite of that. Our water-buffalo herds are sparse and, for the purposes of dairying, practically feral. They’re difficult to acquire and expensive to raise. They produce only a fraction of the milk you get from a typical dairy cow, and they are so psychologically fragile that it’s hard to even get that much out of them.  Once you do get milk, it’s hard to know exactly what to do with it. The Old World secrets of mozzarella production have mostly stayed in the Old World; I’ve yet to eat a ball of the domestically produced stuff that even begins to compare. (It tends to be rubbery, like a giant white pencil eraser.)
Buffalo mozzarella from Italy is perhaps the most difficult cheese to replicate. Is the Silicon Valley consultant-turned-dairy-farmer Craig Ramini in over his head?