DUNCAN, B.C. — 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.
Chef Mara Jernigan uses local tomatoes, the farmês fresh buffalo mozzarella cheese and eggs collected from their own chickens to create a breakfast frittata for guests in the big Fairburn Farm kitchen. (Cinda Chavich for The Globe and Mail)
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.
"It's like looking after dogs - they love to be stroked and petted, they're really docile and easy to milk," says Mr. Archer of his "girls."
These days, while the Archers concentrate on milking their buffalo, they have new partners who focus on the cheese-making side of the business. Natural Pastures makes the buffalo mozzarella, and slow-food activist Ms. Jernigan leases the Archers' farmhouse, running it as an agroturismo inspired by the farm-based guesthouses she has visited in Italy.
Ms. Jernigan helped turn the farm into a culinary retreat, offering weekly cooking classes, weekend gourmet dinners and multicourse Sunday lunches on the veranda, featuring local ingredients from Cowichan Valley farms, including Fairburn's own supply of fresh buffalo mozzarella.
With experience working at a buffalo mozzarella dairy in Salerno, Italy, Ms. Jernigan also helped Natural Pastures develop the Mozzarella di Bufala Fairburn. And now she's perfecting recipes using the fresh cheese for farm guests.
"I have a beautiful fig tree off the veranda here, so I might find a way to use the figs with the cheese," she muses.
There are other fresh mozzarellas on the market, but Canadian-made versions of the bite-sized bocconcini are made from cow's milk, and the vast majority are turned out by machines and sold days, if not weeks, after they are made. Italian Mozzarella di Bufala Campana is available in some cheese shops - but by the time it arrives here, the cheese has aged, losing many of the attributes of a fresh product.
"It just isn't the same," says Mr. Sutter, slicing a ball of his fresh buffalo cheese and pressing it lightly to reveal the spongy texture and a touch of residual milky whey. Ideally, fresh cheese like this is consumed within 24 hours, Mr. Sutter says, but the shelf life is closer to two weeks.
Ms. Jernigan also notes that this Fairburn buffalo mozzarella is a small-production artisan cheese, designed to be enjoyed fresh in the region where it was made. With only about 15 kilograms of cheese being produced each week, it's like a rare wine - now sold only to a few island chefs and supplied to the Fairburn kitchens.
But Natural Pastures will also sell the cheese from its outlet in Courtenay, and some cheese has already found its way to Les Amis du Fromage, a shop in Vancouver that ships cheese to customers within the province.
The Archers are milking 28 cows now and plan to build the dairy herd to 60 animals. Water buffalo can provide milk for up to 20 years, so islanders should have fresh Mozzarella di Bufala Fairburn for their tomato and bocconcini salads for many seasons to come.
"Artisinal foods like these come from the land and are dictated by the seasons," Ms. Jernigan says.
"The caprese salad should only be made in August when the tomatoes are perfect, anyway."
Cinda Chavich's new book,
The Guy Can't Cook: Over 350
Fantastic No-Fail Recipes a Guy
Can't Be Without (Whitecap Books),
is available in bookstores this week.
