Primosale - Easy Fresh Cheese To Make At Home

freshly made Primosale, almost ready for it's first flipWhen testing my rennet before making mozzarella, I found myself with a cup of fresh curds on my hands. Not wanting to toss them, I decided to try to make primosale (pronounced pre-mow-sa-lay, means "first salt") using the small molds we had brought back with us from a lunch in Puglia. It was really simple to make and actually yielded enough to fill 2 of the single serving molds.

They looked great and tasted even better! Inspired, I decided to make a few more to take as a thank-you treat to our friends who had watered our plants while we were away... and then I decided to make a few more the next day as a birthday present for one of our CSA friends... and then of course I needed to some extra for our breakfasts! I was just a little obsessed. The fun of Primosale, other than the sheer ease of making it, is that it lends itself to any flavor combination you could dream up. On it's own it has a fresh, delicate flavor.

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Got Heart - Eating The Offal


pig-pork-heart-cleaned-freshPig Heart - freshly cut on the right, cleaned on the left

That's right - Heart! Another offal nutritional superstar, heart is rich in iron, niacin, pantothenic acid, phosphorous, riboflavin, selenium, thiamin, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, and zinc. You can check out heart's nutritional information here. Handling and cleaning the actual muscle was interesting - more like theater than cooking!  I really wanted to stage a shoot of me pretending to rip the pig heart out of Scrapple's chest, Indiana Jones style, but then decided it might be best to wait until AFTER we were legally married to broach the subject of acting out strange mock ritual reenactments. Maybe next time?  

When contemplating how to make the tastiest first attempt at cooking this noble muscle, we asked the dudes behind the butchers counter at The Meat Hook for their advice. The general consensus was

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Water Buffalo First Steps. I melt!

In the area of Salento, Puglia, we visited a Buffalo Mozzarella maker and farm. La Masseria San Biagio is an old farmhouse that now supports a water buffalo herd and creamery as well as extensive wild herb and vegetable gardens, a young fruit orchard, and an educational farm.

The day we visited we found ourselves the happy witnesses to a baby water buffalo's first steps! I know we'll see many births and first hobbles in our future, but I'm positive that this one will hold a special place with me. After a chat about the Masseria and a walk through their fascinating and madly deliciously smelling gardens, Davide, one of the farmers, told us about the calf that had just been born. He brought us over to a secluded area padded with fresh straw where the most beautiful, doe-eyed, knock-kneed, dewy nosed little creature lay blinking while it's enormous wild eyed and dramatically majestic mother paused from nuzzling and licking it to circle her calf before tossing her fur around and taking one or two "don't mess with my baby!" steps towards us.

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