At Liuzzi Cheese Co., mozzarella-making isn’t just a way of life—it’s a life of whey.
Elliot shook his head in disapproval at the railcar-sized vat of mozzarella like it was cash going up in flames, which wasn’t too far off: if that vat was a dud, Liuzzi Cheese Co. stood to lose what was, by normal-people standards, a shitload of money. But judging from Elliot’s pained expression, almost maternal in its distress, it was more about the mozzarella.
He waved over Maximiliano Laporta, a cheesemaker on the floor, as well as Rodolfo “Ralph” Liuzzi, the president and paterfamilias of Liuzzi Cheese, and they all started firing off in Italian. Elliot stuck his hand in the vat, ripped off a piece of the mozzarella, smelled it, shredded it between his fingers, and finally put it into his mouth. Max and Ralph watched silently. O.K., something was up: Elliot shook his head even more vigorously and pointed into his mouth, saying “La bocca! La bocca!” Soon, everyone was shaking their heads and saying “La bocca!” What a beautiful moment, I thought. Even in an industrial cheese plant like Liuzzi, la bocca, the orifice into which Elliot inserted the cheese, would always have the final say. But through the language barrier and the din Like an airplane toilet’s flush, but you’re locked in the bathroom and the flush is never-ending. of heavy machinery, and aided by good old Italian gesticulation, I began to realize that the problem was not actually the mozzarella that Elliot had sampled, but la bocca itself, which I later learned had been contaminated at breakfast by il caffe Which looked like motor oil, and the amount of caffeine in a single shot of this stuff could have powered a small car. Elliot and Max routinely took 15-minute coffee breaks, and during every minute of those breaks, they were preoccupied with drinking as much coffee as possible. They would have been more productive if instead of heading to the coffee room every few minutes to get their fix, they hooked up to a very long I.V. and la focaccia (loaded with enough garlic to impair the buds for days).
Something was always breaking down or straight-up exploding at Liuzzi Cheese Co., and it was Elliot’s job to fix it. Which was generally accomplished by telling someone else to fix it. Elliot, a middle-aged shortish guy with a largely hair-colonized head and the remnants of a jacked physique from his years in military school, always wore a hairnet in case of freak accidents, which happened more often than you’d think. Other parts of his job, from what I could discern, were to: (1) know the traditional Italian cheese recipes by heart; (2) sample mozzarella regularly, and in doing so, eat—if one thinks about it—quite a lot of mozzarella every day; (3) sell cheese to wholesale corporations with entire departments dedicated to out-bargaining him; (4) generally exude a kind of Don-Corleoneish A favorite refrain of his was, “Liuzzi’s a family.” Between that and him actually being Sicilian, I was tempted to ask if he did the Cosa Nostra thing, but even a writer’s indecency has its limits. authority that was benevolent yet unfuckwithable.
My day at Liuzzi began in a conference room above the cheese plant, somewhat protected from cheese odors, where Elliot explained the difference between thermophilic and mesophilic bacterial cultures. (As far as you’re concerned, they’re basically the same thing.) Once I had sufficiently understood these prerequisites, Elliot went on to less elementary material—Anatomy of the Mozzarella Vat—but just before he turned to the whiteboard, he realized his lecture was best continued by simply pointing at a vat. He handed me a three-piece uniform: hairnet, lab coat, and rubber boots.
The boots were absurdly high-topped—I couldn’t even bend my knee properly because they were up to my lower thigh—and I began to feel a bit apprehensive. Were we going to wade into a mozzarella vat?
“It’s wet out there,” was all Elliot said. He was right: there was no land in sight on the cheese floor. Buckets were positioned under drainage pipes to catch the machines’ cheesewater runoff, and judging from the way the pipes were gushing, the buckets must have done their job for about two seconds: every single one was overflowing. “This is by design,” Elliot made sure to dictate to my notepad. What I really had to watch out for were pipes that seemed inactive but on occasion blitzkrieged me with cheesewater. It felt like running across those fountains in public parks that unexpectedly shoot jets of water up from the ground, except in this case I really would have preferred not to get wet, because again: this was cheeswater. Cheesewater, the best term I came up with for the byproduct of milk processed into curds and whey, was a seminal-looking fluid around 200 degrees Fahrenheit with little white flecks of cheese-booger in it. If the scalding didn’t get you, the cheese-boogers would.
Meanwhile, Elliot was avoiding cheesewater jets with the nonchalance of a barefoot monk on coals. He was conducting routine checkups with the workers on the floor, and in most cases I was too preoccupied with dodging large yellow Rubbermaid buckets brimming with milk, cheese, or cheesewater that workers were rolling at high speeds across the walkway to pay him any attention. From what I could tell, though, it seemed like Elliot was just making sure everything was shipshape. “We fixed it before you got here,” one worker said, before Elliot had a chance to speak. This earned the worker a thumbs-up.
Once we found a quieter corner, I asked Elliot what exactly he was checking on.
“That’s my job. I’m not making cheap, alright?” he said. That may sound like so much PR-man hot air, but Elliot was serious.
Later, I learned that they had thrown out the entire vat of mozzarella. The taste was fine, but it was just slightly—indiscernibly, to anyone not a Liuzzi—too soft.
Elliot told me. “Legend is that a farmer was transporting A dead goat. his milk in the stomach of a goat, and when he got to his destination, he no longer had milk. He had curd and he had whey. The milk had transformed The ancients, bless their hearts, thought about sex in cheesemaking terms. Aristotle wrote that semen acts on menstrual blood in the same way that rennet acts on milk: the semen coagulates the blood into a fetus. Perhaps it was all a way for the church to shorten lines at the confessional booth—just thinking about it makes one want to forsake the pleasures of the flesh. due to the enzymes in the stomach lining.”
The grand finale of the mozzarella-making process is the cheese-stretching. I saw many tasks bungled at the cheese plant, but nothing came close to cheese-stretching in terms of sheer bunglability. Cheese-stretching is the step that distinguishes award-winning mozzarella from the stuff on bowling-alley pies, and Liuzzi wasn’t taking any chances. The cheese-stretcher, Maximiliano Laporta, had been imported from Italy. Maximiliano referred to himself as “The Maestro of the Maestros,” often and in the third person. That was about all I gathered from his introduction, because the only language Maximiliano spoke was Italian. Sometimes he would try to help me out by throwing in a little English and Spanish and ASL, but that just confused me further, since he often used all those languages in a single word. The language barrier occasioned some peculiar misunderstandings, e.g., I asked him if he had a girlfriend and he replied, “Several hundred.” Before I could double-check my translation of “girlfriend,” Maximiliano, seeing my alarm, clarified that throughout his life, he had had several hundred girlfriends. Right then, he only had three.
If there was one thing Maximiliano liked more than women, though, it was Italy. Maximiliano, it must be said, was an unapologetic Italian supremacist, and I began to suspect he knew English but simply chose not to speak it. Once he had finished his introduction, he set himself a challenge: stretching a batch the traditional way to prove to me that traditional Italian cheese-stretching methods were superior to any machine.
. . . . .
At this juncture, I should mention that given my history with traditional cheesemaking, the battle Maximiliano had chosen to fight was not so much uphill as cliff-faced. Long ago, during those impressionable, for- mative childhood years, I ran afoul of cheese on a trip to a ranch in California.
The trip had been billed to me and my brother as one of rest and relaxation. We got there and all too late realized it was a bait-and-switch: cheesing season was in full swing. Animals had to be milked, stables had to be washed, shit had to be shoveled. To city-bred tweens like me and my brother, this arrangement had all the hallmarks of indentured servitude. What’s more, all the cheese was goat cheese: an acquired taste in the best of cases, and this was certainly not that sort of case. This goat cheese was horrid. It was tart. Even the goats’ milk was off. The goats must have been on a diet of their own cheese or something.
To make matters worse, just walking around the ranch was hazardous. Bags of cheese were hung everywhere—from barn eaves, gazebo trusses, shower doors—so that the whey could drain from the curds. Every few minutes, a single drip would fall from the bottom of any given cheesebag, soiling whatever was below. Everyone, and especially the bald, lived in fear of the drip.
Running away from the ranch was no good: we would eventually get hungry and have to return to eat dinner, which was an even worse experience than making the cheese. Somehow, the owner of the ranch found a way to include goat cheese (which she insisted on calling “le fromage de chevre,” despite our being in the furthest place from Paris on this earth) in every dish.
One evening, after enough of our carping, she made two lasagna trays: one, she claimed, with goat cheese, the other without. They both tasted like goat cheese. After that, we didn’t trust the food any farther than we could throw it—which, in most cases, was the trash. Later, that food would be fished out and fed to the goats. C’est la brie. At the end of the week, the ranchers sent us off with a care package. More like an apology gift, my brother said. <\span> <\span> Halfway home, gripped by a paroxysm of suspicion, we pulled over and inspected it. Inside were several large jars of goat cheese. We thought about composting the cheese on the side of the road right there and then but ultimately deemed it unfit even for bacterial consumption, so for all I know it’s still in the terra incognita that is the back of my parents’ fridge, seven years later.
. . . . .
I mention all this only to give an idea of how when I entered the Liuzzi factory, it was with a certain degree of pprehension; and how when Liuzzi’s promotional brochure described their cheesemaking as “old-fashioned,” I interpreted that with more than a soupçon of mistrust; and how when Maximiliano finally proffered me his “tradizionale” mozzarella, instead of downing it in one bite, I sort of tentatively crept up on it. Maximiliano had melted some curd into a blob, caught the blob on the end of a wooden stick, and thrown it around with a technique somewhere in the neighborhood of pizza-throwing—a skill at which he was apparently some kind of genius. He had once been a pizzaiolo but found it lonely at the top of the pizzaiolo hierarchy, so he pivoted to cheesemaking, where it appeared he was having the same problem.
He wouldn’t let me wait too long, though: the cheese couldn’t cool past a certain temperature. While it cooled, I received a brief but intense disquisition on the temperature at which one should consume mozzarella. Mozzarella shouldn’t be consumed if it’s colder than room temperature, and certainly not at any temperature approaching that of a refrigerator. In fact, if you’re going to eat it straight out of the fridge, the hard-core Italians say (of which Maximiliano was one), don’t bother eating it at all. I didn’t bother telling him that the rest of America, with their chilled caprese salads and unthawed string cheese, eats it in exactly such a manner. Maximiliano had already dealt America many blows, and I worried that with any more of his cultural critiques, America would surrender and hoist the tre-colore flag.
I took a bite, and by God, I really did prefer Maximiliano’s handmade mozzarella to the Liuzzi-label stuff. According to my unqualified cretino of a palate, it was waxy? mossy? chalky? Cheese descriptors tend to be inversely desirable to their desirability when describing other foods. Fortunately, I didn’t need to translate any of those thoughts; I felt that vigorous nodding, as well as pointing at my tongue and giving a thumbs-up, would suffice. But Maximiliano had already begun attending to the next batch and didn’t even look at me. There was no need—he had been certain of the outcome from the start. His mozzarella would prevail. Maximiliano claimed that the traditional method of stretching cheese was superior because the wooden stick’s soft edges “caressed” the cheese instead of “maltreating” it, as the machine did. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all a placebo until I looked at the water. Unlike the murky, fat-laden water from the machine, this water was clear, indicating that the cheese hadn’t been slashed open and leached of its flavorful fats. That was the first empirical, measurable evidence I saw that traditional methods outperform modern innovation.
In all metrics other than quality, though, tradition lost spectacularly. The only time Max stretched mozzarella traditionally—when he wasn’t proving a point—was at weddings where the bridal couple wanted something quirkier than an accordion player or a balloon artist.
That is not to say that Liuzzi’s absolutely top-hole machines were entirely superior: they, too, had their drawbacks, albeit more insidious ones. Later that day, I stood with Elliot beside a burrata-making machine so large and convoluted that it was impossible to tell where the burrata actually was in the machine. The Italian logo on the machine resembled the sleek silver lettering of high-performance car logos, probably to connote the one desirable quality such cars share with industrial cheese-making machines: speed. Across the way, Elliot pointed out a station of ricotta packagers. They were scooping ricotta into containers, at times sampling it to check the texture, all the while keeping up an animated banter in Italian. Elliot said, loudly and excitedly, “I’ve got a ricotta machine on order. Right now, I can only do six cups a minute. Once I have the machine, I can do forty.”
The ricotta makers looked up.
. . . . .
Mozzarella may have had its origins in serendipity, but most accidents in the cheese plant were of the sort that would get someone fired. Inside the plant it was possible to, among other things, drop a thousand pounds of mozzarella from a forklift, or mess around with a water boiler such that it would become a missile and annihilate the entire building before wreaking devastation for another quarter-mile. Elliot recounted a time when an absent-minded worker, instead of adding your garden-variety CaCl2 to a mozzarella vat, added fifty pounds of the rather more explosive C7H6O4. “It was like a ‘What the fuck.’”
Customers don’t have much patience for accidents in general, but especially not the high-end chefs buying Liuzzi mozzarella, whose own customers wanted their capreses and chicken parmigianas done just so. Elliot knew those chefs wanted a good mozzarella ball—but more so, they wanted the same mozzarella ball. Ever since Liuzzinmade it onto the supermarket shelf, Galbani’s mass-produced mozzarella had been right there beside it, a few cents less, beckoning. Elliot cited an old family adage: “If you’re gonna make shit, make shit every day.” Related to Elliot by “Joe,” Elliot’s uncle and founder of Calabro Cheese, who it seems I am expected to be familiar with on a first-name basis. When he is invoked (“as Joe used to say…”), it’s with the same worshipful intimacy jazz players have when they talk about “Miles,” or Scientologists when they talk about “L. Ron.”
I asked him if there were any companies that made shit every day.
“Galbani,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation. “Go buy a little Galbani ricotta, and you’re gonna see. It’s gonna be like Jello.”
Elliot tended to be even-keeled, but on the subject of shit-making cheese companies his feelings ran high. He reserved the ultimate accusation for Kraft Singles: “It’s not cheese. A Kraft Single, that’s not cheese.”
In fact, Elliot was right: Kraft Singles, containing less than 51 percent of dairy products, fail to meet the legal definition of cheese and are instead registered under the The famous turophile Clifton Fadiman wrote, “Cheese is milk’s leap toward immortality.” If so, the never-expiring Kraft Single is cheese’s leap toward immortality. term “pasteurized prepared cheese product.”
There wasn’t much that could get between Elliot and his top-quality cheese. (For Pete’s sake, the guy was throwing out entire mozzarella vats due to textural aberrations only an Italian palate could detect.)
In fact, there was really only one thing that could prevent Elliot from making top-quality cheese, and it was a value equally as sacred to Italians as good cheese: family. The two values didn’t conflict often—the Calabros, Elliot’s family, are something like the Rockefellers of top-quality fresh Italian mozzarella cheese—but when they did, family won.
. . . . .
It wasn’t more than a few words into my first conversation with Elliot before the Calabros came up. This was around 5 a.m. (the workers arrive at 2 a.m., so everyone was already like two coffees and countless mozzarella balls in), and I should say I was lucky to even be talking to Elliot at all. That morning, despairing of ever finding a cheesemaker who wasn’t an FDA-cowed, red-tape-lovin’ bureaucrat and who would actually deign to talk to a civilian, I mounted my bike and rode for an hour in pouring rain, traipsed through a forest (likely private), forded a creek (with the bike), had a standoff with a porcupine, and arrived at a beige military-looking warehouse that was in fact the very out-of-the-way Liuzzi Cheese Co.—only to be told (accurately, as it turned out) that my appointment was scheduled for the following day. Fortunately, the older woman working the front desk—a bona fide “nonna”—took pity. She calmed me down, offered me some cheese, and secured me an audience with Elliot. While expressing my gratitude to Elliot for admitting me to his office, I mentioned that I had called Calabro Cheese Co.—the only other Italian fresh cheese company in New Haven—multiple times, and they didn’t so much as pick up.
“Not surprised,” Elliot said.
You can’t talk about Liuzzi without talking about Calabro. Although there was a bit of the two-sheriffs-one-town issue at play between the two companies, the relationship between Calabro and Liuzzi was more textured than just a rivalry. A better term might be what people these days would call a The kind of friends who shake hands and both mutter “Asshole” the moment they’re out of earshot.
All toxic relationships start out happily. Back in their days as local cheesemongers in the 1980s, the Calabros and the Liuzzis were just two families using cheese to barter with their friends, as they had done in Italy. But capitalism soon had its way: both Calabro and Liuzzi outgrew their garages, expanded their local cheese routes, and encountered each other.
Elliot, despite working for the Liuzzis, was a Calabro by blood. He grew up rollerblading around the floor of the Calabro cheese plant, swiping humungoid blocks of mozzarella to eat with his friends, and making five cents an hour. Meanwhile, his father, Frank, worked around the clock to make Calabro run. When Frank slept, which wasn’t often, it was in a bedroom he installed at the plant.
But Calabro’s peaceful days were numbered. Joe Calabro, the kingpin of Calabro Cheese, had developed Alzheimer’s, and it wasn’t long before the Calabro empire was up for grabs. There ensued a Murdochian battle for the reins of Calabro, involving a whole lot of subterfuge, alliances behind closed doors, and streams of choice Italian epithets, all of which Elliot would only refer to under the vague heading of “Italian family drama.” The upshot of it all: one day, without warning, Frank’s relatives banded together and gave him the axe. Unless he could throw his lot in with another cheese company, Frank’s cheese-making days were over.
Even after Frank’s unceremonious ousting, his reputation as a cheesemaking whiz persisted, and there was one cheesemaking family happy to employ both him and his son Elliot: Liuzzi. As for Calabro Cheese, it was perhaps inevitable that under the new regime, whose constituents Elliot “wouldn’t pay to sit on a box and watch paint dry,” the company began to go under. It appeared Calabro Cheese’s secret ingredient was none other than Frank Calabro. Soon, the company called asking him to return. Frank couldn’t bear to watch his life’s work burn, so he set aside his grudges and accepted. Elliot, however, made Frank promise that once they shored up Calabro’s finances, they would sell the company.
“He couldn’t stay away. And I didn’t want him to work until he died,” Elliot said.
In 2021, the Calabro family, with Elliot’s approval, sold Calabro Cheese to a venture capital firm. Elliot quickly regretted it. He stayed on the board for the year following the sale, and saw his family’s legacy crumble.
“It was, ‘How can we cut costs, cut labor? How can we screw over our competitors? How can we just make as much cheese as possible, as cheap as possible?’ And that’s not what the company was built for,” Elliot said. “We’re not making sub-one-dollar ricotta that major manufacturers buy by the trailer-load. No. We’re quality.”
Elliot left the board, went back to Liuzzi, and, by the time I met him, had all but disowned Calabro Cheese. Oddly enough, though, he stood by the decision to sell. “It was putting family first,” he told me—but wouldn’t go into further detail.
For all of Elliot’s misgivings about the sale, though, it did come with some undeniable perks. Just a few weeks ago, Frank, who had hardly ever stepped foot off the cheese floor in his life, returned from an Icelandic cruise.
. . . . .
In adapting to America, the Liuzzi and Calabro families had distanced themselves from cheese. Elliot often said “Liuzzi’s a family,” but beyond the PR-ish boilerplate sense that he probably intendedit to mean, there was the truth: the Liuzzi family members—including Elliot, their adopted son—were on top of the corporate pyramid, and it was non-Liuzzi workers who were actually making the cheese. By the time I spoke to Elliot, the Calabros who had presided over Calabro Cheese’s degradation had cashed out in a big way and were living what most would call profoundly American lives.
“I don’t blame them,” Elliot said. I couldn’t tell whether he was just being diplomatic for the press, or if he really was indifferent to the actions of those Calabros. If the latter, then what were Elliot’s own motives? He already operated Google Sheets more often than cheese machines. Someday, he might have become Liuzzi’s CEO and hardly ever have seen an actual mozzarella ball; if he did, it was not unreasonable to think that with a profit to be made and a place in the Hamptons not far off, Liuzzi would be sold—thereby consummating the American dream. In fact, parts of that dream had already begun to materialize for Elliot. As I left the plant, I asked him what his kids wanted to be. “Baseball players,” he said.
On the way out, I had the urge to stop by the Liuzzi shop and buy as much mozzarella as my college budget would allow. I’d probably never be back, and it seemed to me I’d be making a purchase for posterity—for a time not far off when I’d be watching Liuzzis hit home runs on TV, when Galbani would finally quash its competition for good, when Liuzzi cheese could only be found in the dry-goods aisle, the dubious distinction of “REAL CHEESE!” printed on its plastic jar. But I didn’t buy anything. It would have been silly to stock my fridge with Liuzzi mozzarella in an attempt to cling to a fading era. Like the Italians say, the cheese wouldn’t taste the same.
Miles Zaud is a junior in Saybrook College.
