Thank you, Mr Buffalo
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Ouyang Yuancheng's mozzarella recipes include the traditional ones such as the classic salad with sliced mozzarella on top of tomatoes. [Photo provided to China Daily] |
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Though many of his recommended recipes are traditional ones-the classic salad with sliced mozzarella on top of tomatoes, and pizza topping - he recently posted pictures on his micro blog showing how to cook mozzarella in hotpot, a creative experiment.
In his mozzarella factory in Tengchong, he has a restaurant offering eight Chinese style dishes using buffalo mozzarella.
The cheese in Chinese supermarkets, says Ouyang, is mostly the processed cheese catering to consumers who know no better. He says more than 80 percent of the ingredients in processed cheese are additives, such as sugar and starch.
"It means there is 80 percent uncertainty in terms of food safety," he says. He insists on producing cheese made from pure buffalo milk.
It is easy to tell a good mozzarella from inferior cheese, Ouyang says, by testing how elastic it is. If there are additives, he says, the strands will break easily when the mozzarella is stretched.
Buffalo milk contains high levels of protein and there is no need to add chemicals to improve the levels of protein, the main reason why melamine was found added to milk in China in 2008, a scandal which almost destroyed the dairy industry.
Ouyang says he has gotten high praise from some consumers. That actually makes him nervous, because he feels it shows that Chinese consumers are still very disappointed in the dairy industry in general.
"That's just what natural mozzarella should taste like," he says. "You can't have the taste of meat from mozzarella."
