Mozzarella: This is a test

When I was a kid, we used to eat at this great Italian place where our favorite dish was the Four-cheese Pizza. The menu didn’t say which cheeses, and no one asked, we just trusted the good folks of Casa de Pasta to pick the four good ones.

Times have changed, and to be sure, not for the simpler. Take this Four-Cheese pizza of my ancient history. I’m pretty sure one of those cheeses was probably this:

Not anymore. Now your average pizza experience will probably, if you live around the bay-area especially, require you to have a semi-doctoral relationship with your menu’s ingredients list.  Mozzarella alone has its own intricate nomenclature spanning a wide range of treatments, developmental stages, and protected designations of origin.

There’s mozzarella di bufala, the traditional mozzarella made from the milk of the water buffalo and fiordilatte, the cow’s milk equivalent. When twisted into a plait it is called treccia, when smoked: affumicata. There’s burratta, burricotti, scamorza, the latter which is also known as provola or provoletta. There’s also manteca, low-moisture mozzarella, and (deep breath) Caciocavallo Silano, which is like mozzarella but thought to be originally made of the milk of a mare, which accounts for its name translating directly to “cheese on horseback.” Horse cheese. That’s one you’re definitely going to want to know before ordering.

Okay so that’s a lot. And you’re only on the part of the menu that tells you what’s above the sauce part of your pie. Then you have to know the names of local farms, recognize any number of cured meats, be able to identify species of wild foraged foodstuffs, and muster the courage to either get out your iphone and start decoding micro-greens, or just ask.

It seems that part of growing up in the information age is the innate expectation that everything you come in contact with should be accompanied by a biography, or at least imply the need for one. We have developed not only a refined taste for great ingredients, but a taste for information that has become increasingly insatiable and inextricable from our ability to enjoy even the simplest of things. Which begs the question: Is the food driving the story, or is the story driving the food?