水牛奶酪，乳制品中的神來之筆

      Go Ahead, Milk My Day
      水牛奶酪，乳制品中的神來之筆

      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.”

      “莫薩里拉水牛奶酪”就是美國奶酪生產行業里的大白鯨：一個如此奇妙和強烈的夢想，使多少理智的人陷入了毀滅性的偏執狂式的追求之中。盡管我們國家飲食運動最近有所成就（祖傳火雞香腸藏紅花冰棒；小豆蔻燈籠椒蛋黃醬泡沫），但目前為止，在美國還沒有人能搞清楚，如何準確地重現這種相對簡單的來自東半球的美味——一種意大利人每天都在生產，本質上只有一種原料（水牛奶）的食物。而事實上，在過去的15年里，生產真正的“莫薩里拉水牛奶酪”的嘗試——準確把握它的味道和口感——已經使從佛蒙特到洛杉磯的許多公司破產。這似乎真是注定要失敗的。“極地的風吹過，”如果梅爾維爾(Melville)是一個美食作家的話，他也許會這么寫，“食肉猛禽在它的上空盤旋。”

      At the risk of straining the analogy, you could call me the Ishmael of this quest.

      盡管有濫用類比之嫌，但你還是可以將我稱為這個探索中的“以實瑪利”（Ishmael，《圣經》中亞伯拉罕之子，意指社會公敵——編注）。

      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.

      通常我并不具有美食家的秉性。我從小就喜歡土豆塊燉金槍魚，我身體體重的三分之二大概都是番茄醬。我從來都沒有吃過魚子醬或鵝肝。但“莫薩里拉水牛奶酪”似乎有一種神秘的力量在呼喚著我。自從我在二十幾歲的時候發現了奶酪的存在后，我就在想著它，只要見到就吃，吃的量很可能已經多到對我的健康不利了。這是僅有的幾種我只要在菜單上看到就會不假思索地點上的食物。很多年前，沒有任何特別的原因，我帶著全家開車去拜訪一家在佛蒙特的水牛奶制品公司——這家公司貴得離譜的水牛酸奶花去了我微薄薪水的很大一部分。不用說，那家公司幾年之后就倒閉了。這雖然讓我省下了很多錢，但也造成了同等程度的感情痛苦。

      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.”

      你可能會覺得它不過是跟隨處可見的奶酪稍微有一點區別，而我說的這些真是小題大做，但其實不是這樣的。新鮮的“莫薩里拉水牛奶酪”是意大利美食的奇跡之一。它與普通的莫薩里拉奶酪一模一樣，唯一的區別是它的原料是水牛奶——這有點像是在說，“希望鉆石”與“希望鉆石”的塑料仿制品一模一樣，唯一的區別是前者是用無價的晶態炭做成的。水牛奶的脂肪大約是普通牛奶的兩倍,使得它更加柔滑、香醇。好處就是幾乎不可思議地柔軟——似乎“口感”這個詞就是專門為此而發明的——它的味道之深令即便是最新鮮的手工制作的普通莫薩里拉奶酪嘗起來都像言過其實的奶酪條。“莫薩里拉水牛奶酪”是乳制品里的神來之筆：處于酸奶、奶油凍、白軟干酪、鮮奶油和乳清干酪之間的黃金分割點。它徜徉在液體與固體之間的神秘邊境之上（與之類似的有云朵、水銀、熔巖、光子和流沙）。對它的描述仿佛就是詩歌。“切開時，”奶酪商人斯蒂芬·詹肯斯(Steven Jenkins)曾這樣寫道，“它會滲出獨特的乳清，帶著甜美、誘人的乳香。”

      Why, then, is it so impossible to get truly fresh buffalo mozzarella in the United States? Well, there are all kinds of reasons.

      那么，為什么在美國做出真正的新鮮“莫薩里拉水牛奶酪”如此難以實現呢？原因有很多。

      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.)

      首先試想一下意大利的情況，那基本上是完美的。水牛已經在那不勒斯附近的山區生活了一千年左右。（需要澄清的是：那可不是生活在美國大草原上的體積龐大、顏色棕褐、性格粗野、毛發濃密的野牛；而是你可能在關于中國水稻種植的紀錄片里看到過的那種皮膚光滑、顏色較深、牛角彎曲的動物。）一個意大利奶酪制作者告訴我，這種動物是由漢尼拔(Hannibal)首先從亞洲帶入意大利的，他用它們運回他的戰利品——這是一則有爭議的歷史故事，但的確抓住了奶酪那神話般的異國情調。經過幾個世紀的實踐，現代意大利人已經將水牛乳制品發展成了一門科學：動物遺傳學、人類專門技術、農場基礎設施——均一一就位并完美結合。如果你走進那不勒斯的一家商店問起莫薩里拉奶酪，你就會拿到一團很有可能是幾個小時前才凝結成的水牛奶。（而要是問起品質低劣很多的普通牛奶——美國商店默認的可都是這種牛奶——你必須用一個完全不同的名字：白牛奶[意大利語：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.

      意大利是一個典型的東半球國家——地形復雜，每個地區都對本地的傳統和美食極度忠誠——這就意味著你會很自然地認為奶酪是在當地當天制作的。這個想法已經深深地扎根于日常生活，為無數代的奶酪食用者所深信，所以確保了它的市場。而且意大利也不太大，因此將新鮮的產品從一個主要城市運送到另外一個，只需要幾個小時。

      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.

      而美國的情況正好與此相反。我們的水牛群稀少，從制作乳制品的角度看，基本算是野生的。很難獲得并且飼養起來很貴。它們產出的牛奶，只相當于標準的乳牛的一小部分，而且它們的精神是如此脆弱，所以即便這么點奶都很難獲取。

      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.)

      即便是你擠到了牛奶，你也不太清楚該怎么處理它。東半球的莫薩里拉奶酪生產的秘密大部分還保留在東半球；我到目前為止所嘗過的美國國內生產的奶酪連與之比較的資格都沒有。（它韌性更大，吃起來就像一大塊白色的橡皮。）

      Then there’s the problem of distribution. Our country is huge: essentially 31 Italys glued together. Our food system, accordingly, is organized around supermarkets, which favor processed foods with long shelf lives, not fragile cheeses intended to be eaten within hours of their making. Many Americans don’t even know that buffalo mozzarella is a thing: we’ve developed a taste for hard little vacuum-packed balls of nearly flavorless cow’s milk that we can melt easily over pizza.

      然后就是運輸問題。我們國家太大了：像31個意大利粘在一起。與之對應的是，我們的食品體系是圍繞著超市組織起來的，青睞于那些經過處理的保質期長的食品，而不是脆弱的奶酪，它們最好是在生產出來之后幾個小時內就吃掉。甚至許多美國人根本都不知道“莫薩里拉水牛奶酪”這種東西：我們已經養成了對硬邦邦的小真空袋包裝的偏好，那種很容易融化在披薩上的幾乎沒有任何味道的牛奶。

      All of which combines to make the economics of water-buffalo dairying in the United States totally brutal.

      所有這些因素加起來，使得美國的水牛乳制品業完全無法生存。

      Of course, Ahab, rather famously, didn’t stop sailing just because Moby-Dick was hard to find. If anything, that made him only more obsessive.

      但是我們都知道，亞哈（《大白鯨》的主人公——譯注）當然沒有因為大白鯨蹤跡難尋而停止出海。恰好相反，這只會使他更加癡迷。

      Enter Craig Ramini, the latest American adventurer hellbent on making fresh buffalo mozzarella — one of the very few people in the United States currently brave or foolish enough to do so.

      接下來上場的是克雷格·拉米尼(Craig Ramini)，這位最新的美國探險家決心要生產出新鮮的“莫薩里拉水牛奶酪”——極為勇敢或者愚蠢的美國人才會做的少數幾件事情之一。

      In August, very early one morning, I drove out to Ramini’s farm, 60 miles north of San Francisco, in the tiny coastal town of Tomales. (He rents a 25-acre corner of a larger ranch, a hill or two away from the Pacific Ocean, that has been in the same family for generations.) I drove between rows of eucalyptus trees weeping mist, and although I had come to see the buffalo, I was still surprised when I saw them — after miles and miles of cows, they looked like prehistoric beasts lost in the fog.

      八月的一個大清早，我驅車前往拉米尼的農場，他的農場坐落在舊金山北部60英里外，一個名叫托馬利斯的海邊小鎮上。（他租下了一個大農場的一角，占地25英畝，這個農場離太平洋只有一兩座山之隔，已經在同一個家族手里經營了數代。）車道兩旁全是桉樹，葉間的薄霧還未散去，盡管我來就是為了看水牛的，但當我真的看到它們的時候，依然覺得很意外——在連續數英里看到的都是奶牛后，它們看上去就像是迷失在霧中的史前巨獸。

      Ramini is tall and slim, a former college shortstop; he wore khaki cargo pants and a white Ralph Lauren shirt. He’s relatively new to the world of cheese, and his road there was unorthodox. He spent most of the last decade working in Silicon Valley, where his specialty was hooking up hot young programmers with the big corporations that needed their digital services. In the summer of 2009, however, at age 51, Ramini had an epiphany. He decided he wanted to change his life, and he proceeded to do so in a very Silicon Valley way: he stuck Post-it notes all over one wall of his house to form (as he put it) “a Mind Map of happiness and fulfillment.” Three clusters of Post-its emerged: large animals, entrepreneurship and Italian food. (Ramini’s grandfather, an immigrant from Italy, owned an Italian restaurant that Ramini spent a lot of time in as a child.) Buffalo mozzarella, Ramini realized, was a hole in the market that happened to lie right at the intersection of his happiness clusters. Although he was not, at the time, a great fan of cheese, and he had never interacted with a water buffalo, he decided that this was his new calling. He leapt into the project as if he were developing an app.?It became clear to him almost immediately, however, that Northern California was not Italy and that buffalo mozzarella wasn’t going to behave like a dot-com start-up. Ramini has spent three years getting over the most basic hurdles: assembling enough animals (he has a herd of 44) and coaxing milk out of them (he had to redesign his barn and stalls, and he’s still taking in only 60 gallons of milk a week — about a ninth of his goal) — and beginning the daunting process of turning that milk into perfectly formed cheese. There have been some disastrous moments and plenty of sleepless nights. The first few months’ worth of batches weren’t even close to being viable. So he hired two Italian cheese consultants to help guide him. Although he says the product is improving, he still hasn’t been able to get it right. When I visited him, he had yet to sell a single ball of mozzarella.

      拉米尼長得又高又瘦，以前曾是大學棒球隊的游擊手；他穿著卡其布工裝褲和白色的拉爾夫·勞倫襯衫。他算是奶酪世界的新人，而他選擇了一條非傳統的道路。在過去十年的大部分時間里，他都是在硅谷工作，專長是介紹熱門的年輕程序員與需要他們的數字服務的大公司互相認識。但是在2009年的夏天，51歲的拉米尼突然頓悟。他決定改變自己的生活，而且他的做法也是采用了典型的硅谷方式：他把便利貼貼滿了家里的整整一面墻，組成了（他稱之為）“一個通往幸福與滿足的精神地圖”，由三組便利貼組成：大型動物，創業，和意大利食品。（拉米尼的祖父是一位意大利移民，拉尼米的孩提時代有許多時間都是在祖父的意大利餐廳度過的。）拉米尼意識到，仍然是市場空白的莫薩里拉水牛奶酪，恰好處在他幸福道路的交叉口上。雖然他當時并不怎么愛吃奶酪，也從未和水牛打過交道，但他認定這就是他的新使命。他就像是在開發一個應用程序那樣開始了這個項目。但是他很快就明白過來，北加利福尼亞不是意大利，莫薩里拉水牛奶酪也與互聯網創業公司完全不同。拉米尼用了三年的時間才克服了許多基本的障礙：收集足夠的水牛（他目前擁有44頭）和在它們身上連哄帶騙地得到牛奶（他被迫重新設計畜棚和畜欄，即使這樣他一周也才得到60加侖的牛奶——大概只是他目標的九分之一）——然后開始將牛奶變成完美成形的奶酪的艱巨過程。這中間伴隨著一些災難性的時刻和許多不眠之夜。頭幾個月的批次連“湊和”都算不上。所以他聘請了兩位意大利奶酪顧問來幫助指導他。雖然他說產品質量正在提高，但他仍然沒有能夠找對路子。在我訪問他的時候，一塊莫薩里拉奶酪都沒賣出去。

      At his farm, Ramini helped me into tall rubber boots, guided me through an antiseptic boot wash and then welcomed me into his cheese factory. The word “factory,” in this case, is probably a little grand: there were only two tiny rooms — 250 square feet altogether — with a concrete floor, stainless-steel tables and white-tile walls. (“A lot of what I’m doing,” Ramini said, “is trying to be clever with limited space.”) It felt like a cross between a restaurant kitchen, a science lab, an operating room and a prison cell. Ramini and I stayed in that space, just the two of us, with only a few short breaks, for the next 11 hours.

      在他的農場里，拉米尼幫我穿上高幫橡膠靴子，帶我走過一個鞋子消毒池，最后就來到了他的奶酪工廠。“工廠”這個詞在這里可能有點夸大：只是兩個小房間——總共250平方英尺（約23平方米）——水泥地板、不銹鋼桌子和白瓷磚墻。（“我做的很多事情，”拉米尼說，“就是努力去聰明地利用有限的空間。”）這就像是一個餐廳廚房、科學實驗室、手術室和監獄牢房的綜合體。除了中間有幾次短暫的休息，我和拉米尼——就我們兩個——在那個空間里整整呆了11個小時。

      Buffalo milk is about 80 percent water, and turning it into cheese involves getting rid of most of that. The cheesemaking day turns out to operate on a similar ratio: 80 percent idle time, 20 percent action. You note a temperature or sprinkle some bacterial powder, then sit around for 90 minutes, then note another temperature, then sit around again. Ramini and I endured long stretches of silence. Sometimes it felt as if we were in an avant-garde play. We stared out the window to watch a pair of Black Angus calves trying to nurse from a Holstein mother. Meanwhile, Ramini’s small batch of precious milk, collected painstakingly over the previous three days, heated and cooled and churned and curdled and drained its whey in a stainless-steel vat.

      水牛奶含有大概80%的水分，而將其變成奶酪則需要去掉大部分的水分。奶酪制作程序其實大概也是這樣一個比例：80%的空閑時間，20%的行動時間。記錄一下溫度或者撒些細菌粉，然后坐等大約90分鐘，然后再記錄溫度，再坐等。我和拉米尼保持了長時間的沉默。有時感覺我們就好像在表演一場先鋒戲劇。我們盯著窗外，一對黑安格斯牛犢試圖去喝一頭荷蘭乳牛的奶。與此同時，拉米尼在前三天里苦心收集的一小批珍貴的牛奶，在一個不銹鋼大桶里被加熱，冷卻，攪拌，凝固并排干乳清。

      Between the silences, Ramini told me things: facts, biography, business plans, dreams. Buffalo semen, he said, arrives from Italy in a container of liquid nitrogen that looks like R2-D2. A buffalo cervix comprises three concentric rings. Buffaloes don’t moo; they bark like seals. At some point Ramini gave me a cup of fresh buffalo milk, which was pleasantly rich and coated the inside of my mouth. We drank coffee with buffalo milk in it and exchanged stories about Larry Bird. Ramini grew up “a country-club kid” from Massachusetts, the son of a doctor who had courtside seats during the Celtics’ glory days. After a few hours, I found myself fluent in the esoterica of cheese: agitators, stretch testing, pH windows, rennet, airspace probes. Eventually, the fog burned off, exposing a layer of blue that had apparently been there all along.

      就在沉默間隙，拉米尼告訴我的是：事實，生平，商業計劃，夢想。水牛精子，他說，裝在一個長得很像機器人R2-D2（《星球大戰》里的機器人——譯注）的液態氮容器里，從意大利運來。水牛的子宮頸是由三個同心環組成的。水牛不會哞哞叫；它們的叫聲更像海豹。拉米尼在某個時刻遞給我一杯新鮮的水牛奶，它的濃郁讓人十分愉悅，在我的口腔里覆蓋了一層。我們還一邊喝著加了水牛奶的咖啡，一邊互相交換關于拉里·伯德(Larry Bird)的故事。拉米尼是在馬薩諸塞州長大的“鄉村俱樂部小孩”，他的父親是個醫生，在凱爾特人隊最輝煌的年代有著場邊座位。在幾個小時之后，我發現自己對制作奶酪的秘方已經了如指掌：攪拌器，拉伸測試，酸堿值窗口，凝乳酶，空氣探針。最后，霧氣終于散去，露出很明顯一直都在那里的藍色天空。

      That day, Ramini was tweaking his recipe — more starter culture, lower temperatures — in hopes that his final product would be a little more tender. “The elusive thing,” he said, “is softness.”

      拉米尼那天正在微調他的配方——發酵劑多一點，溫度低一點——希望能將他的最終產品做得更加柔軟一點。“難以捉摸的東西，”他說，“就是柔軟。”

      There’s a metaphor there, perhaps.

      這里面也許含著一個暗喻。

      Ramini admits to having the classic Silicon Valley personality — Type A, obsessive, self-promoting — and this has not always gone over well with the laid-back, lower-profile, communally spirited artisanal cheesemakers in the Bay Area. Ramini is media-savvy and has somehow managed to generate national attention before producing any first-rate cheese. (“That’s catchy,” he said about my Great White Whale theory of buffalo mozzarella. “I wish I had thought of that myself. I’d have been using it for over a year now.”) He seems to see many of his artisanal-cheese-world competitors as financially na?ve, given the fact that, despite all their high principles and fellow-feeling, they can’t afford to quit their day jobs because they manage to give away so many of their profits to middlemen. Ramini’s goals are more ambitious: to fill his 79-gallon vat with buffalo milk every single day, turn it into perfect mozzarella and sell it directly to restaurants and consumers, with no middlemen, for $35 a pound — a plan that he calculates would yield around $1.5 million a year and set him up for the rest of his life.

      拉米尼承認自己有著典型的硅谷人格——A型行為，強迫癥，自我推銷——而這使他并不總是那么容易與海灣地區悠閑、低調、富有公共精神的手工奶酪制作者們打交道。拉米尼精于傳媒，不知怎么著就能在生產出任何高級奶酪前就吸引了全國范圍的注意力。（“那非常吸引人，”他這樣評價我將“莫薩里拉水牛奶酪”比作大白鯨的理論。“我要是能早些想到這個比喻就好了。那樣我一年多前就開始用它了。”）他似乎認為手工奶酪界的許多競爭者在財務上很幼稚，他的看法是基于這個情況：盡管這些競爭者的產品質量很好，也受顧客歡迎，但是他們都不敢辭去其他工作，因為他們把那么多利潤都拱手讓給了中間商。而拉米尼的野心更大：每天都用水牛奶裝滿他79加侖的大桶，將其做成完美的莫薩里拉水牛奶酪，然后砍掉中間商，直接以35美元一磅的價格買給餐廳和消費者——他計算過，這個計劃每年能收入大概150萬美元，這就是他下半輩子的生計了。

      “I haven’t met a cheesemaker yet who says, ‘That’s a brilliant idea,’ ” Ramini told me. “Tuning out part of the community was not in my business plan. It’s an unforeseen challenge.”

      “我還沒有遇到一個乳酪生產者對我說：‘這個計劃太棒了，’”拉尼米告訴我說，“與這個圈子不太相容，可不在我的商業計劃之內。這是我沒有預料到的挑戰。”

      When the fog finally rolled back in, around 6 p.m., Ramini had turned his batch of milk into 30 wet white bricks of mozzarella curd — the raw material of one of the most elusive cheeses on earth.

      下午6點，濃霧再次襲來，拉米尼已經將他的牛奶變成了30塊磚形濕白凝乳——地球上最難以捉摸的一種奶酪的原材料。

      He crumbled one of the brick’s edges into rough little chunks, over which he poured hot water. The first batch didn’t act right — the chunks wouldn’t cohere — so Ramini waited 20 minutes and tried again. It didn’t work. He waited 20 more minutes, then 20 more. On the fifth try, the curds did exactly what he wanted them to: they fused together and got stretchy and soft, and Ramini squeezed them into a smooth, pure white ball that looked like the real Italian thing. He sliced it. We tried it. It tasted good, like the milk, but it was rubbery, squeaky against our teeth — very much not Italian. The elusive softness eluded him still.

      他將其中一塊的邊緣弄碎，弄成粗糙的小厚塊，并澆上熱水。第一批的反應不對——這些厚塊并沒有凝結——所以拉尼米等了20分鐘再試一次。還是沒有成功。他又等了20分鐘，然后又一個20分鐘。第五次嘗試時，凝乳終于跟他所希望的完全一樣：他們融化在一起然后變得又韌又軟，然后拉米尼將它們捏成一個光滑純白的球，看起來就像那種真正的意大利奶酪。他將它切成薄片。我們嘗了一下。味道不錯，像牛奶，但當牙齒咬下時感覺像橡膠，吱吱作響——非常不像意大利奶酪。他依舊沒有抓住那難以捉摸的柔軟。

      Ramini says texture is the final hurdle, and while he’s confident that he will get over it eventually, he has little idea when that’s going to happen or who’s going to help him or where that person might be. He’s planning a trip to Italy, with a local chef, in hopes that someone there might give him the answer.

      拉米尼說質地是最后的難關，雖然他確信他最終會跨過這道難關，但他并不知道這什么時候會發生，或者誰會幫助他，或者那個人在哪里。他正在計劃和當地的一個大廚去一趟意大利，希望那里有人能告訴他答案。

      After my trip to Ramini’s farm, I spoke with Raffaele Mascolo, a cheese consultant who is originally from Naples but now lives in Wisconsin. Mascolo was one of the Italian experts who worked, for a couple of weeks, with Ramini. Together they managed to produce, Mascolo told me, “decent” mozzarella. He praised Ramini’s intelligence and passion but said that, in spite of those qualities, it could still take him a lot of time — another year or two, maybe — to produce consistently high-quality mozzarella. It’s not the world’s most difficult cheese, Mascolo said, but it’s also not something you can rush.

      我拜訪了拉米尼的農場之后，和拉斐爾·馬斯克婁(Raffaele Mascolo)通了話；他是一位奶酪顧問，他來自那不勒斯，現在居住在威斯康星。馬斯克婁是曾經和拉米尼一起工作過幾個星期的意大利專家之一。馬斯克婁告訴我說，他們一起生產出了“不錯的”莫薩里拉奶酪。他稱贊了拉米尼的聰明和激情，但是他說，雖然拉米尼具有這些品質，他依然需要花很多時間——一到兩年，也許——來穩定地生產出高品質的莫薩里拉奶酪。馬斯克婁說，這并不是世界上最難做的奶酪，但也不是你隨隨便便就能做出來的東西。

      We were talking via Skype, and Mascolo left the screen for a minute. He came back with a handful of cheeses he had made — caciocavallo and caciotta — to show me. At one point he popped a small ball of mozzarella (made in Minnesota out of a blend of cow and goat cheese) into his mouth and actually exclaimed, “Mamma mia!” He showed me a wooden statue of a water buffalo that he keeps in his home. “This is my God,” he said.

      我們是通過Skype來交談的，馬斯克婁離開了屏幕一分鐘。他回來的時候，手上拿了一堆他自己做的奶酪——羊奶干酪和鮮干酪——展示給我看。談話過程中他突然拿出一小團莫薩里拉奶酪（產于明尼蘇達，是用牛奶酪和山羊奶酪混合制成的），放進他的嘴里并且喊道，“Mamma mia!”他拿給我看他放在自己家里的一個木制水牛雕像。“這是我的神，”他說。

      I recognized, I thought, a familiar glint in his eye, and sure enough, toward the end of our conversation, Mascolo told me that he was thinking about getting into the buffalo-mozzarella business. When I asked him for details, he was mysterious, but the look was still there, as was the surge of hope in my heart. As Melville the food writer might have put it: “Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.”

      我覺得，在他的眼睛里我看到一絲熟悉的光芒——這一點最終得到確認：在我們的談話將要結束時，馬斯克婁告訴我他正在考慮進入“莫薩里拉水牛奶酪”生意。當我問及細節時，他就顯得很神秘，但這個表情還在，還有我心中那澎湃的希望。就像梅爾維爾作為美食作家可能會寫的那樣：“這就是無休無止的，是的，不可容忍的塵世的努力。”