Smoke It

Holy crap! Has it really been almost a month since I last wrote? Even after I said I was going to blog like once a week or some such nonsense? I have no excuse- I've been home from work for the past few weeks- so all I can say is, well, I got lazy. Okay, now we can get down to business. And this week's business is cheese. That's right, you've waited nearly a month to read a blog post about cheese. But there is a reason why this is important. I spent previous blog posts raving about Concord grapes, pastrami, and homemade bread- each of them a supreme example of three of the four major food groups, covered in detail by yours truly. That leaves one food group for me to tackle: the cheese group.

I'm sure you've all heard of buffalo mozzarella. It's one of the classic cheeses of Italy. Have you ever wondered how it's made? Like, are the Italians milking buffalos to make cheese? Can you even imagine anything more ridiculous? I'm not going to explain the process (that's what Wikipedia is for), but I am going to say that there is no longer any reason to eat it. That's because of something called smoked mozzarella. Smoked mozzarella is like buffalo mozzarella except that it's about ten times as delicious. My current obsession is Cucina Fresca smoked mozzarella ravioli. This is the best store-bought ravioli I have ever tasted. It hits all of the umami-specific taste buds on my tongue, and it hits them hard. You can put a jar of the worst pasta sauce on it and it will still taste fantastic. It must be noted, however, that I have tried other brands of smoked mozzarella that were nowhere near as good. So you have to be careful. But once you find the good stuff, there's no going back to the buffalo.