No, You Can’t Make “burrata From the Inside” With Mozzarella and Cream
Burrata is a beautiful thing. For the uninitiated, burrata is a cheese consisting of a tender shell of mozzarella wrapped around a juicy mixture of mozzarella curd and cream. This internal mixture is also known as stracciatella and is what gives burrata the edge over mozzarella. I like to eat stone fruit burrata or use it in caprese, although we still have a few months to get access to seasonal peaches and tomatoes.
A video has surfaced on Instagram claiming you can make stracciatella by mixing store-bought mozzarella with heavy cream. This, unfortunately, is not true.
In the video, Mackenzie Smith of grilledcheesesocial tears some cheese into small pieces, coats those pieces in heavy cream, adds a little salt, and then lets the cheese soak in the cream for “at least half an hour.” Smith then spreads the mixture on bread, drizzles with truffle oil, and seasons with pepper.
I did the same thing – without truffle oil – and I can tell you that this particular technique does not lead to stracciatella because it is scientifically impossible.
The combination of cheese and heavy cream doesn’t taste bad, because how could it? It’s cream and cheese. You can put it on bread. It tastes great, but is much more clumsy and heavy than the real stracciatella. Turning store-bought mozzo into stracciatella would be like turning butter into whipped cream; they are all made from the same material, but both the butter and the mozzarella have undergone chemical and structural changes that cannot be corrected. This is the only cow that, so to speak, cannot be milked.
Difference between mozzarella, burrata and stracciatella
As I mentioned earlier, burrata has two ingredients: mozzarella and stracciatella. According to all recipes, the preparation of burrata begins in much the same way as the preparation of moza:
Burrata begins, like any cheese, with cultures and rennet, which are added to warm, fresh cow’s milk. As the milk begins to curdle, the whey separates and drains. The curd is then poured with boiling water, which is then pulled out, essentially making mozzarella.
Extra fresh curd is then added inside the mozzarella along with cream and the mozzarella is wrapped around this mixture. Cottage cheese has a striped, torn appearance, hence the name “stracciatella”, which means “rag” in Italian. (And the curds do look like torn, stretched rags, especially if you squint a little.)
Mozzarella cannot turn back into cottage cheese. The texture of the former is much denser and chewier than the latter, and pouring cream on top won’t fix that.
But is it really that tasty?
The mixture of cream and torn mozzarella really tastes good. It’s much heavier and clumsier than the real stracciatella, but I ate it on bread with a little olive oil and pepper and didn’t get mad at it. Stracciatella is tender, tender, and delicately creamy, while this “cracked” version is springy, slightly chewy, and floats in heavy cream. It’s too much to eat very much in one sitting, but that’s not necessarily a criticism.
However, I don’t see why you don’t just buy burrata, since trying to make it yourself won’t save you that much money. To make this surrogate stracciatella, I bought a three-dollar ball of mozzarella (and it was on sale) and a two-dollar half-pint of heavy cream. It’s five bucks, and you can get a burrata for six. Maybe this is not the highest quality burrata, but it is still a burrata, which means that there will be a real stracciatella inside.