Italian cooking relies heavily on the freshest and best ingredients. So to make sure you’re only using the best and check out Nifeislife online
If you love pizzas then you know that the crucial ingredient is not pineapple (yuk!) but the best mozzarella you can get your mitts on. The cheapo ones just won’t do, they’re rubbery not luvverly and have almost no taste at all.
A good test of a mozzarella is would you want to eat it uncooked in a classic salad of tomato, mozza and basil? We’ve probably all forced down the terrible trattoria version – ice cold watery tomato from Holland, basil from a bag and mozzarella from god knows where. It shows no love lives in the kitchen.
Well when you shop for Italian online at Nifeislife you can relax. They are determined to only sell the best and sent us some samples to show their confidence. And believe us, if we hadn’t liked them you wouldn’t be reading this.
The first thing we did was eat the Burrata. As you probably know this is the King or Queen of mozzarella. It has to be super fresh or it’s wasted. A famous Formula One racing driver once told me it was part of his contract that he would get fresh Burrata flown to him wherever he was in the world. A private jet carrying nothing but some balls, that’s how much klout he had. Or balls.
Nifeislife’s burrata is made by a small cheesemonger in Noci, in the Puglia region using the old techniques and it comes to London twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. This Burrata has a thin casing that splits like a well poached egg to let the centre of fresh cream and unspun mozzarella curds flow out.
It’s wonderful with a few twirls of Nifeislife’s delicious prosciutto, of which they have a large selection of types and slices all sent out sliced properly waffer-thin and between plastic. I would though prefer to see them use waxed paper, for the environment’s sake.
We also tried Nifeislife’s Datterini tomatoes, small plum tomatoes. Usually plum tomatoes are not ideal for eating raw, the usual size plum tomatoes are thick fleshed and with fewer seeds,which is what makes them so good for tinning and using in sauces but not for salads. These however were as easy to eat as grapes, popping crisply in the mouth and tasting sweet with a just hint of benign acidity.
The company also source and supply a range of mozzarellas, buffalo of course as anything elses is barely worth bothering with, and these are hand-cut with a beautiful gloss sheen. Nifeislife import their fresh “mozzarella di bufala” directly from a small artisan farm in Campania, the region around Naples, called La Baronia.
Controls applied by La Baronia ensure that the milk and its conversion into cheese all happens exclusively in the Caserta and Salerno provinces as well as in selected areas of Latium. The DOP certification has been obtained in 1996 and has been valid since, making La Baronia one of the most renowned producers in Italy.
The’seam’ shows you these are made by hand and when you tear the mozzarella onto your pizza base, please never slice or grate it, you can see a granularity and texture always missing from supermarket impostors. The cheese slumps under pizza oven heat to create irregular pools of molten deliciousness. It’s also good uncooked, but a top tip is to submerge the unopened bag in hottish water for a good fifteen minutes first, this brings out all the flavour.
Nifeislife’s range of products is very large, bigger than most bricks and mortar delis, all it lacks is the delicious aromas. Whether its meats, wines, oils, cheeses, water, vegetables and of course pasta, it’s a wonderful one stop online shop that everyone can pop into.