Buffalo mozzarella

Buffalo mozzarella is a fresh cheese, and fresh cheeses are low for a different reason from aged ones: the lactose left with the whey when the curd was drained, rather than being eaten over time. Removal beats fermentation here, and it happens in an afternoon rather than a season.

Buffalo mozzarella is made from a milk richer in fat and solids than cow's, and it is sold sitting in its own whey - which keeps it moist and keeps some lactose in the tub rather than in the cheese. Drain it and eat it fresh; it is not a cheese that improves with days.

Buffalo mozzarella is low because it is a fresh cheese eaten within days, and it is ageing that builds amines in cheese. Histamine in dairy is a storage measurement, not a recipe one. Pasteurisation, starter culture, salt, pH and ripening time decide more than the name on the label.

Milk's sugar is lactose, a disaccharide of two units - the D of the acronym and not the O. Cow and buffalo milk do carry genuine oligosaccharides, but in traces: a hundred times less than human milk, and far too little to count here.

Buffalo mozzarella is a fresh cheese eaten within days of making. On this axis dairy splits in two, and the dividing line is ripening: aged cheese is one of the four foods a MAOI diet excludes outright, while fresh dairy is among the safest things on the shelf. The same milk becomes either one.

Dairy is the lowest-nickel food group there is - milk was measured at about 15 micrograms per kilo, a few micrograms in a glass. Buffalo mozzarella is mostly water and fat, and neither carries the metal. The nickel here follows a national survey covering four decades - the kind of series that shows whether a level is drifting, which a single study never can.