Big beast, soft cheese

By Alan Titchall

How do you milk a 800kg buffalo, the size of a small car, with ominous horns sticking out each side of its head like a couple of scimitars? The answer - very gently.

The Clevedon Valley in the southwest corner of Auckland is now one of the city’s most popular cuisine tourism regions, with its artisan foods and boutique wineries. Driving through the valley between the grapes, the olives and the sheep, you might also spot a herd of milking buffalos.

The herd is owned and milked by the aptly named Clevedon Valley Buffalo company, and how it managed to wrestle a herd of water buffalo through the red tape protecting the country’s primary industry is long story that we can’t do justice to here, but it stretches back to 1996 when the Dorresteyn family imported their first herd of 36 crossbred buffalo from Darwin in Australia.

Riverine (Indian) buffaloes are the black ones with short thick curly horns and a little smaller than their swamp buffalo cousins, which are grey and have longer horns. Both species are Asian in origin and produce quality lean meat, but it’s the riverine species that is farmed in the Mediterranean for its high fat content milk used in making ‘stringy’ cheeses such as mozzarella.

Swamp buffalo became a serious problem in the Northern Territory when animals imported from Asia turned feral. In the 1980s there were hundreds of thousands of them romping around northern Australia doing untold damage before their numbers were culled down to less than 100,000. In the 1990s, encouraged by a new demand for exotic produce, the owners of domestic swamp buffalo herds (bred for meat) started importing riverine buffaloes from America in the 1990s for cross-breeding programmes – initially to increase meat productivity but later to produce buffalo milk.

Back at Clevedon, many years of hard work by the Dorresteyn family has resulted in a milking herd of 25 buffalo cows and a breeding herd of around 100 that are closely related to the docile, big black, short horned beasts farmed in the Mediterranean for their sweet milk.

Docile they might be, but it pays to milk these giants gently. Unlike cows, they do not accustom to regular milking easily and their sheer size requires wide milking shed cubicles, while their relatively small udders need special pumping equipment imported from Italy. After all this, production per beast is modest – around seven litres of milk or a third of what could be expected from a cow.

Making the first traditional soft cheeses from the milk was a long journey concedes Helen Dorresteyn, and the family produced cheese from the Clevedon herd for some two years before the family was happy putting their products on the commercial market. Hand-made and labour intensive, they are said to be the first such cheeses made in the country from milk sourced from a herd of riverine water buffalo that graze on open pasture.

Processed daily, the chalky white milk has a very delicate flavour that makes a dry/clean and very velvety yoghurt (a great substitute to sour cream and a condiment to add to sauces with Mediterranean dishes and curries), and two cheeses - mozzarella and a very light ricotta.

You can find their cheeses and yoghurt at the Clevedon Village Farmers Market, the Parnell Farmers Market at the end of St Georges Bay Rd in Auckand City, and selected top delis around the country such as Farro's in east Auckland.

And expect these exquisite products to become more common on our food retail shelves as the Clevedon Valley milking herd expands.

Helen also talks about the company producing meat products in the future. Buffalo meat is said to be taster and leaner in fat than beef.

“We are also looking at producing buffalo milk icecream for the summer,” she adds. “One of my lasting impressions of coffee in Italy is a beautiful short espresso topped with buffalo cream.”

Clevedon spring hit

Keeping it simple, our chefs put together a sample of Clevedon buffalo mozzarella the way the Italians like it – on a ciabata bruschetta with tomato, basil, olive oil, and ( to add a kick to the taste buds) an anchovy fillet and a few capers.

The bruschetta

This was originally any old (more than a day) home-made bread put to a second round by being toasted over a fire then rubbed with garlic and doused in olive oil while still hot. Variations on this theme have turned into a bruschetta free-for-all with toppings only confined by culinary imagination.

We like using ciabata loaves because of the bread’s texture. How you cut the loaf, how big you want to make your individual bruschetta pieces, is up to you. The ciabata loaves we used here weren’t that big and we have cut the loaf vertically into 3mm strips, but you can cut the bread base to any size you want for serving – as long as you end up with a flat surface for the toppings.

We fried both sides of our bread pieces in olive oil and a little garlic. While not necessarily the approach recommended by most recipes (that brush the bread with olive oil before grilling) it gives the surface of the bread that Kiwi ‘fried bread’ crunch.

The topping

Slice the tomato finely and pat off any excess moisture. Layer a few slices on top of the fried bread, add a basil leaf and a slice (1mm) of the buffalo mozzarella ball, a curl of anchovy fillet on top (always use the best product you can afford) and then pop a few capers in the centre.

Drizzle lightly with a little virgin (what else) olive oil from Clevedon - devine!

What you need

Ciabata loaf

Mozzarella cheese ball

Basil leaves

Ripe tomatoes

Anchovy fillets

Capers

Virgin olive oil

Spring 2009

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