{"id":4415,"date":"2025-05-29T03:05:13","date_gmt":"2025-05-29T03:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/the-rise-and-fall-of-burrata\/"},"modified":"2025-05-29T03:05:13","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T03:05:13","slug":"the-rise-and-fall-of-burrata","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/the-rise-and-fall-of-burrata\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rise and Fall of Burrata"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
<\/p>\n

\"\"

\n

\n

Burrata with peaches photo credit Depositphotos<\/a><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Few cheeses have experienced a meteoric rise like burrata<\/a>. Once a regional specialty found primarily in Puglia, the \u201cheel\u201d of Italy\u2019s boot, burrata became a global culinary sensation. From high-end restaurants to social media feeds, its presence is impossible to ignore. In the span of a few decades, this once humble dairy product\u2014originally created as a way to minimize food waste\u2014has transformed into a $2.2 billion industry. But how did it go from a hidden gem to the star of menus around the world? And has it perhaps become the victim of its own success?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Burrata Mania<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n

\"\"

\n

Burrata with tomatoes and pesto photo credit Sebastian Coman Photography<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I remember my first taste, of course. I watched my hostess, the Berkeley-based food maven Roberta Klugman, snip open a globe of burrata with shears, its firm cheese casing folding out into a flower shape, its creamy innards oozing onto some fresh fava beans she\u2019d just harvested from her garden. The meal was maybe in the mid-2000s, after burrata had found a devoted following in North America, but a few years before it went, well, ballistic. This bit of dinner-table theatre had not yet featured in umpteen Tik Tok videos; the once humble cheese had not yet starred in over 1.3 million (and counting) Instagram posts, both still shots and videos; the @burratagram<\/a> Instagram account, with its 123,000 followers, had yet to be launched.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt became a sort of mania, from maybe 2010 on,\u201d says Juliana Uruburu, the retail director at Oakland\u2019s Market Hall Foods<\/a>. She was running its cheese counter at that time and remembers receiving the cheeses from Italy still wrapped in the asphodel leaves in which they were traditionally sent to market in Puglia. \u201cPeople had to have it, burrata, and we\u2019d sell out our whole order so quickly. People would yell at us, \u2018Why didn\u2019t you get more?\u2019 We\u2019d propose some other cheeses they could use in the same dish, but, no, it was burrata or nothing. They\u2019d get emotional about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"

\n

Burrata with tomato, basil and bread photo credit Depositphotos<\/a><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the thick of the burrata boom, Di Stefano<\/a>, the Southern California firm run by the family whose patriarch brought the cheese to America, struggled to keep up with demand. \u201cIt was crazy, sometimes 50 to 60 percent growth per year,\u201d says Stefano Bruno, one of five brothers who manage the cheesemaker founded by their father Mimmo.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Though burrata can be made year-round, customer demand tends to ramp up in the spring, reaching fever pitch in the summer and early fall. \u201cThere\u2019s an uptick in interest when all the stone fruit starts to come on the market, the tomatoes, the stuff people serve with it comes into season,\u201d shares Uruburu.<\/p>\n

I once asked the chef-owner of San Francisco\u2019s Michelin-starred SPQR Matthew Accarino where he sourced his burrata and he referred me to Andrew Zlot, a financier turned farmer with a ranch in Marin County for grazing his herd of water buffalo. When I rang Zlot, he began by begging me, \u201cDon\u2019t say I make burrata, please. The burrata people are insane, they\u2019ll come stampede me.\u201d (The cheese can be made with buffalo milk but is more often made with cows\u2019 milk.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Backlash<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n

\"\"

\n

Burrata media backlash<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This sort of boom tends to beget a backlash \u2013 and one duly came, led by snarky, over-it food writers. New York Times <\/em>critic Pete Wells sniffed, \u201cAnyone can slap a burrata on a plate and wait for the moaning to start.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA Big Fat Blob of Boring\u201d was the headline New York Magazine <\/em>put on a 2023 take-down written by Tammie Teclemariam. The author of the popular Underground Gourmet column said her eyes had begun to glaze over whenever she saw burrata on a menu. She was no longer wowed by the standard combination of the cheese, with, as she wrote, something crunchy (often toasted bread or pistachios) and something \u201cgreen-markety.\u201d Comparing it to the kale Caesar, she wrote, \u201cBurrata has overstayed its welcome.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Time Out <\/em>carped, \u201cWhy the f*ck is there so much burrata in London?\u201d<\/p>\n

Even with all the swipes, demand has remained strong, with Di Stefano experiencing solid but more moderate sales growth of 10 to 12 percent in recent years, according to Bruno. Global demand has been growing by about 5.6 percent per annum, according to Market Research Reports.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"

\n

Burrata pizza<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Over the last few years, Di Stefano has had sales growing at a healthy rate, if not the galloping rate of the pre-pandemic boom. Part of that is no doubt down to the backlash, the sophisticated eaters who say they\u2019ve moved on from burrata. That said, the backlash was never against burrata per se, only against unimaginative uses of it. \u201cOnly someone with lactose intolerance could consider burrata to be \u2018bad\u2019,\u201d Teclemariam wrote, near the end of her Burrata-is-boring takedown. \u201cBut all too often it\u2019s predictable \u2026 serviceable, and totally uninspiring. I don\u2019t blame restaurateurs \u2026 for banking on easy crowd-pleasers, but I find myself wishing more people would try to do something different.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps as chefs find more creative uses for it, burrata will become a stalwart, much as mozzarella has become, rather than a flash in the pan, or in this case, plate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Burrata with peaches photo credit Depositphotos Few cheeses have experienced a meteoric rise like burrata. Once a regional specialty found primarily in Puglia, the \u201cheel\u201d of Italy\u2019s boot, burrata became a global culinary sensation. From high-end restaurants to social media feeds, its presence is impossible to ignore. In the span of a few decades, this … Okumaya devam et “The Rise and Fall of Burrata”<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1271,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[395],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-milk-and-diary"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1271"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4415\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}