The Rise of Buffalo Milk and Buffalo Cheese in the Americas
Water buffalo photo credit Buf Creamery
A quick search yields considerably more links to “buffalo wings” than “buffalo milk” on the internet. Nevertheless, dairy products made from the milk of the water buffalo, an animal native to Asia, are beginning to gain traction in the U.S, casting their rich, silky spell on new customers.
Since the buffalo are mostly imported - they’ve been, historically, imported to Australia as early as 1825 - production of water buffalo milk and its products can pop up, and indeed has been popping up, anywhere from Spain to Texas. An indication as good as any is the appearance of water buffalo milk products, by the Colombian brand Buf Creamery, on the shelves of Whole Foods. Local supermarkets around the U.S and specialty online stores are stocking up, too. Are we on our way to a buffalo milk trend? Importers and producers think so.
Muntanyola Formatge Blau
Jonathan Harris, the co-owner of the popular Spanish online store La Tienda has been in the cheese importing business since 1996. Two years ago, tasting cheese as a judge at the World Cheese Awards in Spain, he came across delicious mozzarella by a small Catalonian producer. It turned out to be water buffalo blue cheese. “I had no idea they had any buffalo in Spain,” he says. “It looks like about 10 years ago a group decided to bring Italian and Bulgarian buffalo to Spain, to develop a local-style mozzarella.” He knew he had to have it - and soon after, Fromatge Blau by Muntanyola was sold on La Tienda. “The richness of the buffalo milk makes for a creamier cheese with a rich, light sharpness flavor profile,” Harris explains. “It’s selling quite well. People are just fascinated by discovering special cheeses, and if the cheese has a story - it adds a level of interest.”
Worshiped or milked?
Just glancing at the water buffalo (an animal Californian producer Audrey Hitchcock says “is just so cool”) provides plenty of interest. Unusual and majestic, the water buffalo appears to be an animal to be worshiped, not milked. And yet, says Hitchcock, the buffalo are the perfect domestic animal once you get to know them. Hitchcock and her husband, the late Craig Ramini, had founded the Tomales-based Ramini Mozzarella in 2008, becoming the U.S pioneers of water buffalo milk products. They bought five buffalo from a company in Southern California and started making mozzarella and ricotta in 2010, selling to neighboring wineries, grocery stores, and farmers markets ever since. “Since our company emerged and people became aware that they can get water buffalo, I’ve never had a marketing problem,” she says. “People find you, and the demand is there.”
Water buffalo milk photo credit Buf Creamery
New American producers: a growing herd
According to Hitchcock, newcomers to the market occasionally reach out for advice and comradery. “There’s definitely more producers emerging now,” she attests. And newcomers keep arriving; in 2017, Colorado-based Annabella Creamery, which incorporates milk from Colombian water buffalos on its slick-looking yogurts, mozzarella and dulce de leche, became available on Amazon Fresh. Most recently, a water buffalo creamery opened in Fredericksburg, Texas. Buffalo milk soft serve can now be found at the popular Bi-Rite Creamery in San Francisco, made from water buffalo milk provided by the Petaluma-based Double Eight Dairy, which opened in 2012. “We started with offering buffalo milk one day a week to see if guests liked it – and they loved it - so it quickly became our core ingredient,” says Kris Hoogerhyde, co-owner and general manager at Bi-Rite Creamery.
For Hitchcock, the math is even simpler: “It’s one of the highest quality kinds of milk - roughly double the butterfat, double the protein, half the lactose, half the cholesterol,” she says. “Higher flavor content, much lighter texture.” It’s only a matter of time before this equation gets on everyone’s radar.