好英语网水牛奶酪，乳制品中的神来之笔
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.”
“莫萨里拉水牛奶酪”就是美国奶酪生产行业里的大白鲸：一个如此奇妙和强烈的梦想，使多少理智的人陷入了毁灭性的偏执狂式的追求之中。尽管我们国家饮食运动最近有所成就（祖传火鸡香肠藏红花冰棒；小豆蔻灯笼椒蛋黄酱泡沫），但目前为止，在美国还没有人能搞清楚，如何准确地重现这种相对简单的来自东半球的美味——一种意大利人每天都在生产，本质上只有一种原料（水牛奶）的食物。而事实上，在过去的15年里，生产真正的“莫萨里拉水牛奶酪”的尝试——准确把握它的味道和口感——已经使从佛蒙特到洛杉矶的许多公司破产。这似乎真是注定要失败的。“极地的风吹过，”如果梅尔维尔(Melville)是一个美食作家的话，他也许会这么写，“食肉猛禽在它的上空盘旋。”
At the risk of straining the analogy, you could call me the Ishmael of this quest.
尽管有滥用类比之嫌，但你还是可以将我称为这个探索中的“以实玛利”（Ishmael，《圣经》中亚伯拉罕之子，意指社会公敌——编注）。
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。我从小就喜欢土豆块炖金枪鱼，我身体体重的三分之二大概都是番茄酱。我从来都没有吃过鱼子酱或鹅肝。但“莫萨里拉水牛奶酪”似乎有一种神秘的力量在呼唤着我。自从我在二十几岁的时候发现了奶酪的存在后，我就在想着它，只要见到就吃，吃的量很可能已经多到对我的健康不利了。这是仅有的几种我只要在菜单上看到就会不假思索地点上的食物。很多年前，没有任何特别的原因，我带着全家开车去拜访一家在佛蒙特的水牛奶制品公司——这家公司贵得离谱的水牛酸奶花去了我微薄薪水的很大一部分。不用说，那家公司几年之后就倒闭了。这虽然让我省下了很多钱，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.”
你可能会觉得它不过是跟随处可见的奶酪稍微有一点区别，而我说的这些真是小题大做，但其实不是这样的。新鲜的“莫萨里拉水牛奶酪”是意大利美食的奇迹之一。它与普通的莫萨里拉奶酪一模一样，唯一的区别是它的原料是水牛奶——这有点像是在说，“希望钻石”与“希望钻石”的塑料仿制品一模一样，唯一的区别是前者是用无价的晶态炭做成的。水牛奶的脂肪大约是普通牛奶的两倍,使得它更加柔滑、香醇。好处就是几乎不可思议地柔软——似乎“口感”这个词就是专门为此而发明的——它的味道之深令即便是最新鲜的手工制作的普通莫萨里拉奶酪尝起来都像言过其实的奶酪条。“莫萨里拉水牛奶酪”是乳制品里的神来之笔：处于酸奶、奶油冻、白软干酪、鲜奶油和乳清干酪之间的黄金分割点。它徜徉在液体与固体之间的神秘边境之上（与之类似的有云朵、水银、熔岩、光子和流沙）。对它的描述仿佛就是诗歌。“切开时，”奶酪商人斯蒂芬·詹肯斯(Steven Jenkins)曾这样写道，“它会渗出独特的乳清，带着甜美、诱人的乳香。”
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，为什么在美国做出真正的新鲜“莫萨里拉水牛奶酪”如此难以实现呢？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.)
首先试想一下意大利的情况，那基本上是完美的。水牛已经在那不勒斯附近的山区生活了一千年左右。（需要澄清的是：那可不是生活在美国大草原上的体积庞大、颜色棕褐、性格粗野、毛发浓密的野牛；而是你可能在关于中国水稻种植的纪录片里看到过的那种皮肤光滑、颜色较深、牛角弯曲的动物。）一个意大利奶酪制作者告诉我，这种动物是由汉尼拔(Hannibal)首先从亚洲带入意大利的，他用它们运回他的战利品——这是一则有争议的历史故事，但的确抓住了奶酪那神话般的异国情调。经过几个世纪的实践，现代意大利人已经将水牛乳制品发展成了一门科学：动物遗传学、人类专门技术、农场基础设施——均一一就位并完美结合。如果你走进那不勒斯的一家商店问起莫萨里拉奶酪，你就会拿到一团很有可能是几个小时前才凝结成的水牛奶。（而要是问起品质低劣很多的普通牛奶——美国商店默认的可都是这种牛奶——你必须用一个完全不同的名字：白牛奶[意大利语：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.
意大利是一个典型的东半球国家——地形复杂，每个地区都对本地的传统和美食极度忠诚——这就意味着你会很自然地认为奶酪是在当地当天制作的。这个想法已经深深地扎根于日常生活，为无数代的奶酪食用者所深信，所以确保了它的市场。而且意大利也不太大，因此将新鲜的产品从一个主要城市运送到另外一个，只需要几个小时。
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.
而美国的情况正好与此相反。我们的水牛群稀少，从制作乳制品的角度看，基本算是野生的。很难获得并且饲养起来很贵。它们产出的牛奶，只相当于标准的乳牛的一小部分，而且它们的精神是如此脆弱，所以即便这么点奶都很难获取。
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.)
即便是你挤到了牛奶，你也不太清楚该怎么处理它。东半球的莫萨里拉奶酪生产的秘密大部分还保留在东半球；我到目前为止所尝过的美国国内生产的奶酪连与之比较的资格都没有。（它韧性更大，吃起来就像一大块白色的橡皮。）
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.
然后就是运输问题。我们国家太大了：像31个意大利粘在一起。与之对应的是，我们的食品体系是围绕着超市组织起来的，青睐于那些经过处理的保质期长的食品，而不是脆弱的奶酪，它们最好是在生产出来之后几个小时内就吃掉。甚至许多美国人根本都不知道“莫萨里拉水牛奶酪”这种东西：我们已经养成了对硬邦邦的小真空袋包装的偏好，那种很容易融化在披萨上的几乎没有任何味道的牛奶。
All of which combines to make the economics of water-buffalo dairying in the United States totally brutal.
所有这些因素加起来，使得美国的水牛乳制品业完全无法生存。
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.
但是我们都知道，亚哈（《大白鲸》的主人公——译注）当然没有因为大白鲸踪迹难寻而停止出海。恰好相反，这只会使他更加痴迷。
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.
接下来上场的是克雷格·拉米尼(Craig Ramini)，这位最新的美国探险家决心要生产出新鲜的“莫萨里拉水牛奶酪”——极为勇敢或者愚蠢的美国人才会做的少数几件事情之一。
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.
八月的一个大清早，我驱车前往拉米尼的农场，他的农场坐落在旧金山北部60英里外，一个名叫托马利斯的海边小镇上。（他租下了一个大农场的一角，占地25英亩，这个农场离太平洋只有一两座山之隔，已经在同一个家族手里经营了数代。）车道两旁全是桉树，叶间的薄雾还未散去，尽管我来就是为了看水牛的，但当我真的看到它们的时候，依然觉得很意外——在连续数英里看到的都是奶牛后，它们看上去就像是迷失在雾中的史前巨兽。
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.
拉米尼长得又高又瘦，以前曾是大学棒球队的游击手；他穿着卡其布工装裤和白色的拉尔夫·劳伦衬衫。他算是奶酪世界的新人，而他选择了一条非传统的道路。在过去十年的大部分时间里，他都是在硅谷工作，专长是介绍热门的年轻程序员与需要他们的数字服务的大公司互相认识。但是在2009年的夏天，51岁的拉米尼突然顿悟。他决定改变自己的生活，而且他的做法也是采用了典型的硅谷方式：他把便利贴贴满了家里的整整一面墙，组成了（他称之为）“一个通往幸福与满足的精神地图”，由三组便利贴组成：大型动物，创业，和意大利食品。（拉米尼的祖父是一位意大利移民，拉尼米的孩提时代有许多时间都是在祖父的意大利餐厅度过的。）拉米尼意识到，仍然是市场空白的莫萨里拉水牛奶酪，恰好处在他幸福道路的交叉口上。虽然他当时并不怎么爱吃奶酪，也从未和水牛打过交道，但他认定这就是他的新使命。他就像是在开发一个应用程序那样开始了这个项目。但是他很快就明白过来，北加利福尼亚不是意大利，莫萨里拉水牛奶酪也与互联网创业公司完全不同。拉米尼用了三年的时间才克服了许多基本的障碍：收集足够的水牛（他目前拥有44头）和在它们身上连哄带骗地得到牛奶（他被迫重新设计畜棚和畜栏，即使这样他一周也才得到60加仑的牛奶——大概只是他目标的九分之一）——然后开始将牛奶变成完美成形的奶酪的艰巨过程。这中间伴随着一些灾难性的时刻和许多不眠之夜。头几个月的批次连“凑和”都算不上。所以他聘请了两位意大利奶酪顾问来帮助指导他。虽然他说产品质量正在提高，但他仍然没有能够找对路子。在我访问他的时候，一块莫萨里拉奶酪都没卖出去。
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.
在他的农场里，拉米尼帮我穿上高帮橡胶靴子，带我走过一个鞋子消毒池，最后就来到了他的奶酪工厂。“工厂”这个词在这里可能有点夸大：只是两个小房间——总共250平方英尺（约23平方米）——水泥地板、不锈钢桌子和白瓷砖墙。（“我做的很多事情，”拉米尼说，“就是努力去聪明地利用有限的空间。”）这就像是一个餐厅厨房、科学实验室、手术室和监狱牢房的综合体。除了中间有几次短暂的休息，我和拉米尼——就我们两个——在那个空间里整整呆了11个小时。
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，而将其变成奶酪则需要去掉大部分的水分。奶酪制作程序其实大概也是这样一个比例：80%的空闲时间，20%的行动时间。记录一下温度或者撒些细菌粉，然后坐等大约90分钟，然后再记录温度，再坐等。我和拉米尼保持了长时间的沉默。有时感觉我们就好像在表演一场先锋戏剧。我们盯着窗外，一对黑安格斯牛犊试图去喝一头荷兰乳牛的奶。与此同时，拉米尼在前三天里苦心收集的一小批珍贵的牛奶，在一个不锈钢大桶里被加热，冷却，搅拌，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.
就在沉默间隙，拉米尼告诉我的是：事实，生平，商业计划，梦想。水牛精子，他说，装在一个长得很像机器人R2-D2（《星球大战》里的机器人——译注）的液态氮容器里，从意大利运来。水牛的子宫颈是由三个同心环组成的。水牛不会哞哞叫；它们的叫声更像海豹。拉米尼在某个时刻递给我一杯新鲜的水牛奶，它的浓郁让人十分愉悦，在我的口腔里覆盖了一层。我们还一边喝着加了水牛奶的咖啡，一边互相交换关于拉里·伯德(Larry Bird)的故事。拉米尼是在马萨诸塞州长大的“乡村俱乐部小孩”，他的父亲是个医生，在凯尔特人队最辉煌的年代有着场边座位。在几个小时之后，我发现自己对制作奶酪的秘方已经了如指掌：搅拌器，拉伸测试，酸碱值窗口，凝乳酶，空气探针。最后，雾气终于散去，露出很明显一直都在那里的蓝色天空。
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.”
拉米尼那天正在微调他的配方——发酵剂多一点，温度低一点——希望能将他的最终产品做得更加柔软一点。“难以捉摸的东西，”他说，“就是柔软。”
There’s a metaphor there, perhaps.
这里面也许含着一个暗喻。
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 naïve, 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.
拉米尼承认自己有着典型的硅谷人格——A型行为，强迫症，自我推销——而这使他并不总是那么容易与海湾地区悠闲、低调、富有公共精神的手工奶酪制作者们打交道。拉米尼精于传媒，不知怎么着就能在生产出任何高级奶酪前就吸引了全国范围的注意力。（“那非常吸引人，”他这样评价我将“莫萨里拉水牛奶酪”比作大白鲸的理论。“我要是能早些想到这个比喻就好了。那样我一年多前就开始用它了。”）他似乎认为手工奶酪界的许多竞争者在财务上很幼稚，他的看法是基于这个情况：尽管这些竞争者的产品质量很好，也受顾客欢迎，但是他们都不敢辞去其他工作，因为他们把那么多利润都拱手让给了中间商。而拉米尼的野心更大：每天都用水牛奶装满他79加仑的大桶，将其做成完美的莫萨里拉水牛奶酪，然后砍掉中间商，直接以35美元一磅的价格买给餐厅和消费者——他计算过，这个计划每年能收入大概150万美元，这就是他下半辈子的生计了。
“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.”
“我还没有遇到一个乳酪生产者对我说：‘这个计划太棒了，’”拉尼米告诉我说，“与这个圈子不太相容，可不在我的商业计划之内。这是我没有预料到的挑战。”
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点，浓雾再次袭来，拉米尼已经将他的牛奶变成了30块砖形湿白凝乳——地球上最难以捉摸的一种奶酪的原材料。
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.
他将其中一块的边缘弄碎，弄成粗糙的小厚块，并浇上热水。第一批的反应不对——这些厚块并没有凝结——所以拉尼米等了20分钟再试一次。还是没有成功。他又等了20分钟，然后又一个20分钟。第五次尝试时，凝乳终于跟他所希望的完全一样：他们融化在一起然后变得又韧又软，然后拉米尼将它们捏成一个光滑纯白的球，看起来就像那种真正的意大利奶酪。他将它切成薄片。我们尝了一下。味道不错，像牛奶，但当牙齿咬下时感觉像橡胶，吱吱作响——非常不像意大利奶酪。他依旧没有抓住那难以捉摸的柔软。
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.
拉米尼说质地是最后的难关，虽然他确信他最终会跨过这道难关，但他并不知道这什么时候会发生，或者谁会帮助他，或者那个人在哪里。他正在计划和当地的一个大厨去一趟意大利，希望那里有人能告诉他答案。
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.
我拜访了拉米尼的农场之后，和拉斐尔·马斯克娄(Raffaele Mascolo)通了话；他是一位奶酪顾问，他来自那不勒斯，现在居住在威斯康星。马斯克娄是曾经和拉米尼一起工作过几个星期的意大利专家之一。马斯克娄告诉我说，他们一起生产出了“不错的”莫萨里拉奶酪。他称赞了拉米尼的聪明和激情，但是他说，虽然拉米尼具有这些品质，他依然需要花很多时间——一到两年，也许——来稳定地生产出高品质的莫萨里拉奶酪。马斯克娄说，这并不是世界上最难做的奶酪，但也不是你随随便便就能做出来的东西。
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.
我们是通过Skype来交谈的，马斯克娄离开了屏幕一分钟。他回来的时候，手上拿了一堆他自己做的奶酪——羊奶干酪和鲜干酪——展示给我看。谈话过程中他突然拿出一小团莫萨里拉奶酪（产于明尼苏达，是用牛奶酪和山羊奶酪混合制成的），放进他的嘴里并且喊道，“Mamma mia!”他拿给我看他放在自己家里的一个木制水牛雕像。“这是我的神，”他说。
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.”
我觉得，在他的眼睛里我看到一丝熟悉的光芒——这一点最终得到确认：在我们的谈话将要结束时，马斯克娄告诉我他正在考虑进入“莫萨里拉水牛奶酪”生意。当我问及细节时，他就显得很神秘，但这个表情还在，还有我心中那澎湃的希望。就像梅尔维尔作为美食作家可能会写的那样：“这就是无休无止的，是的，不可容忍的尘世的努力。”