The orb of pristine cheese in Paul Sutter's hand is soft and shiny, the picture of youth in the cheese world.
"It's very delicate at this point," says the Courtenay, B.C., cheese maker, cradling the day-old white mozzarella in his palm like an oversized poached egg.
This cheese is like any good ball of fresh Italian bocconcini, but it's the first artisan buffalo-milk mozzarella commercially made in Canada. It's moist on the inside, with the typical striated layers created by stretching the warmed mass of freshly coagulated curds. It's encased in a tight, thin skin, formed when the cheese is pulled and hand-pinched into a neat round ball.
And like the original - the famed Mozzarella di Bufala Campana - it is made from buffalo milk: a dense, sweet, high-fat milk used to create the finest fresh cheeses.
The milk comes from Fairburn Farm in British Columbia's Cowichan Valley, the only water buffalo dairy in Canada, where owners Darrel and Anthea Archer have just begun to produce enough buffalo milk to create this new Canadian product.
It's been a long and difficult journey from the Archers' importing the first 19 buffalo in 2000 to the unripe Mozzarella di Bufala Fairburn on my plate.
They have skated through a buffalo herd of government regulations, health inspectors, legal battles, cheese-making challenges and other obstacles to get their product to market.
But the bumpy route has finally led to a symbiotic partnership between the Archers, chef and slow-food advocate Mara Jernigan and Natural Pastures Cheese Co.'s Mr. Sutter, creating real buffalo-milk mozzarella and a food lover's retreat to showcase it.
Fairburn Farm sits at the end of a winding rural road near Duncan, just north of Victoria. Mr. Archer's pioneering parents bought the century-old farm - with its sprawling farmhouse and collection of weathered outbuildings - in 1954. A year later, they were organic farmers and formed the Vancouver Island Organic Co-operative, the first organic co-op in Canada.
When Mr. Archer and his British-born wife took over the farm in 1978, they tried raising sheep and dairy cows, but eventually wanted something different.
"I read a little article in a John Deere magazine about a water buffalo dairy herd in Northern Devon, so we went to England in 1998 and met Robert Palmer, who had been raising them for 16 years," Mr. Archer says. Mr. Palmer helped them secure a herd of the animals from Bulgaria, which were quarantined in Denmark before arriving at Fairburn in early 2000.
A month later, mad-cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, was discovered in a single dairy cow in Denmark. While the Archers' water buffalo had had no contact with that cow or that farm, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency ordered them to destroy their animals.
After a long legal battle - which saw many other farmers, individuals and chefs raise $75,000 for the Archers' legal defence - the case was lost and the original 19 buffalo were killed, and subsequently tested for BSE.
None were found to be infected, so the CFIA allowed the Archers to keep their herd's progeny and begin rebuilding. It's these Canadian-born buffalo that are being milked on the organic farm today.
It's plain that the Archers love these animals and it's easy to be smitten by the big, shaggy, brown-eyed beasts as you approach their weathered corral. They are timid but curious and immediately come to the fence to investigate, their fat wet noses held high to catch your scent, and their big ears drooping beneath mops of wavy hair.
They are river buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) originally bred in India for milk production, not the swamp buffalo (Bubalus carabanesis) that are used as draught animals. It's not uncommon to see the Archers in the corral among the huge horned cows, scratching them behind their floppy ears or rubbing their black bellies.
