Simona di Vietri, Cheesemaker
LA LATTERIA
park royal, west london
The streets of Park Royal might be a far cry from the sunny, southern Italian heartland of mozzarella, but here is where Simona di Vietri has won a following for her authentic, London-made iterations of bocconcini, scamorza, ricotta, burrata and more. Starting in 2016 with no food background other than a love of the cheese she grew up with, Simona rolled up her sleeves, learned fast and now covers all angles of the business, whether she’s checking on the curds in her lab’s huge vats or supervising deliveries to the likes of Selfridges Foodhall, her rapidly growing home customer base or one of La Latteria’s many recently reopened restaurant clients, such as Casa Cruz in Notting Hill.
“I’m from Basilicata, a tiny region between Puglia and Campania that no-one knows. My cousin, who I went to school and graduated with, had this intuition 25 years ago, to start a mozzarella business in Milan. I mean, I went on into investment banking and private equity, and he just took his degree, framed it, stuck it on the wall, and started his own business. So obviously, that’s a different approach to life.
Imagine you’re in Milan, and there are trucks coming every day from Puglia and Naples, flooding the market with fresh mozzarella. But it’s still not the same thing as purchasing and consuming the product on the same day it’s made. Because even if you ship it through Italy, which is like, 10 hours driving, you have to pack it, load it, transport it to the dispatch area, then distribute it – so it takes a couple of days before it gets to the table. That’s why my cousin opened his own mozzarella lab in Milan. Five years later, breakthrough: his business takes off and from there he was growing and growing.
And I was always looking at that, especially as a finance person. My idea was, if you're so successful in northern Italy, where you still have all these trucks coming in every day from Puglia and Campania, then imagine outside of Italy, where trucks come on the roads for four days from the south of Italy all the way to the UK, or Denmark or wherever you want it. By the time you get the product on the table you’re talking six days.
But the thing is, once you eat the product immediately after it’s made, it's completely different – the texture, the taste, the colour, the experience… If you keep fresh mozzarella in water for six days, it’s soggy, it’s soft, it has no soul. Industrial products are different because they put preservatives in it, to keep the shape and consistency. So obviously, when people first try ours, the first reaction is usually what is this, because it’s harder, it’s saltier, it's not what they are used to. Mozzarella like ours is different because it’s just fresh and completely natural.
So, anyway, I started to think, working it out – especially now there is a big push for buying local produce – and I realised, this product is not DOP, so there is no specific denomination attached to it, no legal requirements. It’s a product that you can make anywhere, if you have the know-how, and the structure and input.
Britain has some of the best milk in the world. The equipment and machinery I decided to bring from Italy, and for the know-how I brought one or two guys. So instead of bringing the product from Italy, I thought, I’ll import the experience and make it right here.
Obviously it didn’t come challenge-free because the market is different, though massive – everything was imported from Italy – and not an easy one to crack, especially for someone like me with absolutely no idea about the food industry. But the market was there.
“i built the lab from scratch, knowing nothing… my guys work all night. at 1am, it’s like a sauna – with all that steam coming out, it’s like a big, boiling cappuccino machine”
Simona di Vietri
I spent a lot of time with my cousin; I studied. I know everything now. I even run my microbiology myself. I built the lab from scratch, knowing nothing. Right now, as we speak, we’re shut for maintenance because my floor, for the fifth time in four years, blew up. It blew up in the sense it broke and then lifted up, which means you have to disassemble all your lab, redo the floor, and reassemble everything again. It breaks because it's a very extreme environment with the high temperature, steam, and the whey from the milk which is very acidic.
The lab itself is roughly 90 square metres, with everything you need for production: cheese vats, tables for working and a separate area for packing and shipping. We don't keep anything in storage. You order, we produce for you.
Making mozzarella is a very simple process. The only input is milk, rennet and salt; that’s it. But finding the people to start the business was a bit more complicated, because obviously I had to get people from Italy in the beginning. I was very lucky because I found one guy, Michele, who is still with me and is now the head of production. But over the past four years, I must have had maybe 30 cheesemakers from Italy.
We go collect our milk in a big van I bought four years ago that fits 2,000 litres of milk – it’s not like in Italy, where the farmer comes, drops the milk and disappears. Then we take it to our lab, pasteurise it with a big tanker with a 4,000-litre capacity and which we use like a tap.
Every night, my guys receive a production schedule from me or whoever is there to put together all the orders. We receive orders from restaurants two days before [they are needed], and my guys consolidate those with individual orders, so we might have 300kg of this, 10kg of those, 1kg of that. Then they produce all night, the driver shows up around 5.30am, and we package and ship.
At the moment, I have three cheesemakers. Michele is a machine. At one point, he was doing 1,000 to 1,200 burrata a day alone, by hand. I mean, this guy has been doing this half of his life, so he’s very experienced, but it is hard physical work. The coagulation process takes a couple of hours, then, invariably, you need to break pieces of curd and start recooking it. It’s quite physically intense, especially because you are in a place with steam and heat. At 1am, it’s like a sauna, you don’t see anything, especially when they’re making the ricotta because with this you have to reboil the whey at 90-100C. With all that steam coming out, it’s like a big, boiling cappuccino machine.
I have two drivers, and they go out around seven in the morning to deliver – obviously, now it's a bit different to before because we have more [customers] at home. But with restaurants, the lunch service starts at 12, so you need to deliver to them by 11.30am. We had to buy vans to deliver the cheese. We have a very delicate product so sometimes, when we outsourced delivery, we used to get a customer calling us, completely pissed off, because the burrata was broken, the ricotta was all smashed. It's not like you're delivering dried pasta or a pizza; they're very delicate. You start shaking them around, it’s a disaster. So, we had to invest in our own distribution: now, I control my driver, I control my van, I know what to deliver, I teach them and train them on how to deliver.
Obviously, a huge number of my individual customers are Italian, people looking for quality products, people from the south who are missing the authenticity. And we're starting to get also non-Italian customers because of meals eaten out, chefs talking about us, press, people posting on social media. So that's how we've been kind of surviving and growing and getting people to know us – because of people in the industry. It's really word of mouth. When chefs recommend you, that is worth more than any advertising will ever do.
British milk tastes richer than Italian, so mozzarella made here naturally tastes richer. And because it's richer, it's also more yellow – it’s not super-white like an Italian one because in the UK the animals are out at pasture much more than in Italy where they are in barns. So they eat grass, and the grass with the photosynthesis has an impact on the colour, thickness and richness of the milk. Also, the water is much tougher here – we use softener, but it's still very hard and that has a big effect on the process.
The climate is colder, and when you are coagulating at much lower temperatures, that has an impact as well. Also the market is different here: people eat less salt than in Italy. They are not used to a firmer product and are used to buffalo mozzarella which is very different from the cow’s milk one and tends to be milkier, softer. So we just had to adjust to the local environment.
I'm a simple person and I probably shouldn’t say this but I like the plain mozzarella – just the classic one, the smaller format, because I like the hard, very chewy one. I don't really eat burrata, or stracciatella which are our best sold cheeses. And I don’t like dressing it. Sometimes when I go to a restaurant and I see the burrata under a mountain of this stuff, I’m like, how do you even taste it – you don’t even see it! But I guess chefs are like artists, right?”
La Latteria’s authentic Italian mozzarella is made overnight and delivered in the morning. To order online, visit lalatteria.co.uk/shop
Photography: La Latteria
@lalatteriauk
