Let’s unpack the cheesy trend
“Like all things thrust into the spotlight, burrata’s rise to fame has come at a cost.”
Having spent the last two years in Italy, and before that being very much the sort of person who will search for niche cheeses wherever I am, burrata has been on my radar for a while. But, I can’t say I’ve spent all that much time thinking about it…until now. On a recent visit home to Canada, it seemed like suddenly, burrata was everywhere. It was being proudly presented to me on a platter by my enthusiastic aunt in Toronto, sourced from her suburban, big chain supermarket. It was served in the filling for ravioli at a notoriously gastronomically-conservative friend’s wedding. It was on every menu, at every restaurant in Montreal–most alarmingly, a Japanese fusion nightmare of a place that played club music at 7pm and served it as an appetizer with miso, tuna tartare, and jalapenos. My sister and I went to our favorite cheesemonger–from whom I’d often sourced burrata in the past–to pick some up for a family dinner at the request of my father. I’d told him I was happy to eat anything, just ideally not Italian food, to which he replied “What? Not even burrata?!” with such shock and horror that I acquiesced. What had happened in the two years since I left that the very thought of a meal without burrata was enough to send my mild-mannered father into crisis? Turns out, it was a non-issue, as the cheesemonger didn’t have any left in stock anyways. Neither did the Italian grocer down the street, nor the supermarket on the corner. We were met with much the same fate the following week. I brought this up, off-handedly, on a zoom call with my coworkers, who at that point were in Florida and New York, and they had encountered similar situations. Another colleague, from Brussels, who had been working just out of earshot, piped up when he heard the word “burrata,” claiming with excitement, “That’s my favorite cheese!” before going back to not paying attention. Conversely, my Italian colleagues were confused–here, burrata is far less coveted than a good mozzarella, and certainly not worthy of the international frenzy it’s received in recent years.
So how did we, as a society, get here?
Burrata was invented in the early 1920s by Lorenzo Bianchino, a dairy farmer in Andria, Puglia. To avoid waste, he took the scraps of his fresh mozzarella, combining the curds and cream and encasing it in the mozzarella shell, before wrapping it in asphodel leaves and tying the top like a knot to keep it all intact. It was an experiment gone right, and just like that, burrata–meaning “buttery” for its rich, creamy texture and light salinity–was born. As good news famously does, tales of burrata’s birth traveled fast and spread throughout the boot as if by messenger angel.
Fast forward 100 or so years, and the rest of the world seems to have suddenly–and ravenously–caught on. Much like sun-dried tomatoes in the 1980s or cupcakes in the 2010s, burrata has become a capital-T Trend, insinuating itself onto menus of small-plates restaurants from Montreal to Moscow to Melbourne.
Burrata first arrived on international shores by way of Mimmo Bruno, a cheesemaker in Los Angeles who opened his own factory and tried to peddle the stuff of his ancestral home to, at first, quite dubious consumers. This was in 1996. It took a while for anybody to even want to buy burrata until Nancy Silverton, the chef at Campanile in New York, came across his offering and, recognizing the cheese from her travels in Puglia, ordered it and put it on her menu. Still, burrata remained a fairly niche item until well into the 2010s–you could find it, but it certainly wasn’t the ubiquitous household favorite or menu-mainstay it is today. Then along came social media, and with it the advent of foodp*rn. And truly, what is more p*rnographic than the gushing, creamy flood of a just-torn burrata? It’s centerfold-worthy stuff. And, it’s accessible, insofar that literally anybody can replicate the experience at home. The instagram account @burratagram has 131K followers and a hefty 3,470 photo posts of burrata: burrata on pizza, burrata in sandwiches with mortadella and pistachios, burrata heaped atop bowls of pasta, deep fried burrata, balls of burrata arranged in the shape of a heart on a tablescape with candles…you get the gist.
In 2021, Burrata di Andria PGI generated an annual revenue of 56 million euros, constituting just a fraction of the overall production. Notably, the primary international market for Italian burrata is the United States, accounting for 29% of total exports. This is followed by Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
My cheesemonger of choice in Montreal, Fromagerie Hamel, tells me that burrata has been so popular in the last six or so months that they sell out immediately every week, and mostly for larger private orders. Of their four locations in the city, none were able to guarantee when they might get more in for general consumer orders, regretfully all suggesting I instead try my luck with the supermarket selections.
Back in Italy, I spoke to Laura from Box 21 at Rome’s Trionfale market, a cheese and conserves vendor who has a beautiful selection of mostly sheep and goat cheeses from her uncle’s nearby farm. But, she always has burrata. “For the tourists,” she tells me, smiling knowingly. “Everybody always wants it, we sell out every day.”
Like all things thrust into the spotlight, burrata’s rise to fame has come at a cost.
A quick search revealed that there’s been a 900% increase in Google searches for burrata, year-over-year since 2015. I keyed “burrata” into google and found her to be the subject of more scrutiny than Britney Spears, with headlines popping up from TimeOut, Esquire, and Mashed decrying “Why the F*ck Is There So Much Burrata In London?”, “Burrata Cheese is Bad”, and “The Untold Truth of Burrata Cheese”, respectively. Recently, an American journalist got flack online for saying that burrata is boring, causing a frenzy of TikTok cheese evangelists and proud Italians to go to the frontlines.
To be fair, nobody is saying that burrata, the cheese itself, is bad. It is, undeniably, good. What discerning critics have issue with is the sheer unoriginality of it. Every restaurant seems to be a copy of the next, doing little more than plopping a ball of burrata on a plate with a bit of garnish e basta. Low-effort, high mass-appeal, fantastic cost margin for the chefs, who can easily sell this plate for $20 or more, when the raw ingredients cost something around $4 and zero prep or effort is required. A delicious, artisan product has been rendered into a soulless, algorithm-informed token of mass-market appeal. For fun, I asked Chat GPT to write me an idea for a burrata dish for a small plates restaurant. This is what it came up with:
Truffle Burrata Crostini – Toasted baguette slices, truffle-infused burrata, wild mushrooms, chives.
Because I am a journalist, I went one step further, and googled “best burrata dish + [insert city name here]”.
In Montreal, Toronto, Melbourne, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Rome, New York, and Mexico City, the first hit, every single time, was a derivative of “Margherita pizza with burrata”. One New York restaurant even went so far as to adorn a pizza with six balls of burrata–one for each slice–and serve it for a whopping $59.
Honestly, if I had a Euro for every time I’d seen these exact items on some 2016-era gastrobar menu, I’d be able to afford all those burrata starters. Maybe what’s really making the critics so mad is that, via an innocent cheese, we can no longer ignore that we live in an echo-chamber hell of our own creation. There is nothing new or sacred left. We’ve made every book into a film, three times over, and will continue to reboot TV shows until it kills us. We’re given the same bare-minimum time and time again and are expected to clap our hands and squeal in delight, and what’s worse is that, evidently, we do. We’re all drinking the Kool-aid, but the Kool-aid is a perfect parcel of cheese, and it’ll cost you $22 plus tax plus tip.
Something that was created for the purpose of diminishing food waste has now become one of the most exported goods worldwide; Italy exported over 4.4 billion euros worth of cheese this past year, with burrata being one of the four most popular. It feels deeply wrong, but, frankly, not altogether surprising. It’s not burrata that’s the problem, it’s us. We have over-milked the cow, and now we have to pay for it.
