Hiding in the back of the truck, they hesitate to go out to put their hooves in the barn. You don’t need to stress them any more. Just wait a bit. Don’t make too much noise. For the Hauts-de-France region, this is a first: the arrival of buffaloes to make mozzarella from their milk.
A few days ago, Gilberto D’Annunzio, the son of Luigi and Rosa, Italian immigrants who arrived in Denain (Nord) in 1959, was in front of his delicatessen, in the Vieux-Lille district, to negotiate on the telephone the purchase of a young bull for newly arrived buffaloes. “If someone had told me that one day I would find myself discussing the price of a bull! », laughs the one who is also, with his sister Lorena, at the head of famous restaurants and pizzerias in the Lille metropolis. They also have a workshop where they make their own mozzarella. Lorena D’Annunzio and her brother did not miss the arrival of the buffaloes at Any-Martin-Rieux, in Aisne.
“Basically, they are water buffaloes from Southeast Asia. In France, it is only found in Cantal. They will have no problem adapting here.” assures Jean Terrel, owner of an artisanal dairy about thirty kilometers away. He teamed up with the D’Annunzios, who relocated their mozzarella workshop near their future herd of buffaloes. “We don’t have an organic cow’s milk producer in the Lille metropolitan area and, with the war in Ukraine, Danone is buying everything. We have trouble getting deliveries every day and our workshop has become too small,” explains Gilberto D’Annunzio.
“Can’t forget the smell on the train”
Since the opening, twenty-six years ago, of the delicatessen where it all began, he has been supplied with mozzarella di buffala in Campania, this region of southern Italy which holds the only PDO. Everyone agrees: made from buffalo milk, mozzarella is much better. So why not swap cow’s milk for buffalo milk, here in the North, to supply their workshop? They needed buffaloes, but, above all, to find a breeder “pretty crazy” to follow them.
Thanks to his meat supplier, Gilberto D’Annunzio met Ludovic Lambert, who worked with Flemish, an ancient breed that almost disappeared after the Second World War. The two men met in May, when the meadows of Ludovic Lambert, classified as a nature reserve, “are the most beautiful and well flowered”. The son of Italian immigrants and that of a worker from Aisne hit it off. Less than two months later, seven buffaloes, bought in foal, have just arrived from Belgium. They are targeting a herd of about fifty head.
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