For the love of cheese

Auroville Today: What brought you here?

Massimo: Curiously, cheese.

I clearly remember my first visit to India in 1987. I was 20 years old and landed in Mumbai. From there, I could not even book a train or bus ticket because I did not speak a word of English and it was impossible to communicate enough for such simple tasks. In Valle d’Aosta, they speak Italian and French, so we were not taught English, I did not even know what the word ‘bread’ meant. So with food on the menus, I just pointed at things and ended up trying everything.

India energised me, nourished me, made me feel as if I was soaring. I very spontaneously connected to certain cultural elements and became a vegetarian. And that is when I noticed that, except for paneer or some processed Amul products, there was no good cheese available. A certain curiosity was triggered in me. When I got back to Italy, I realised that most of us, even Italians, know almost nothing about cheese or how it is made. We all eat it, yet it remains a mystery.

At the time, I was an arborist, working in the mountains with trees. But one day, in 1989, the opportunity presented itself for me to learn more about cheese. Once every few years, professional one-year-long cheese making courses are offered. These courses are rare because they are only offered when there is a shortage of cheese makers. Everyone else attending the course was much more familiar with cheese making because they were all dairy farmers, not arborists!

Since this happened in Valle d’Aosta, and Fontina cheese is the specialty there, I learnt how to make this particular cheese, which is made with raw cow’s milk, and because raw milk cannot be stored, it has to be produced twice a day, after milking the cows.

There are stringent rules that need to be mastered and always followed according to traditional methods, because these Italian cheeses have the special ‘DOP’ status (Protected Designation of Origin: the cheese is entirely produced in a specific geographical zone). Each step, from production to packaging, is regulated. So the cow needs to be of a certain breed, needs to eat specific food sourced from a specific region, the milk needs to be heated to a precise temperature, and worked in a precise way, otherwise the cheese obtained is certainly still cheese (if it turns out well), but a completely different one.

I love all of this because I keep learning new things everyday in this job. Even today, for example, I experimented and made Halloumi for the first time. One never gets bored, there is something new to discover every day. We cheese makers are like alchemists…we start with liquid milk, it then becomes a curdled substance, which then turns into malleable rubber to become mozzarella.

I started working in a cheese factory. They all wanted me, because in spite of it being a very laborious work, twice a day, morning and evening from 7-12 without exception, I was full of energy and enthusiastically engaged. Those were tough but wonderful days. There were times when I used to drive a milk truck to collect milk early in the mornings, and along the way I got to see the snow capped mountains being lit up one by one by the first golden-pink rays of the sun.

I ended up working with Fontina cheese for ten years. But the thought always remained that I would go to India to make mozzarella some day. After all, the real reason behind me starting my whole cheese journey was inspired by India.

In 1996, I quit my job and came to India, with the intention of finding a place to start a cheese factory. I did some research and asked the Chamber of Commerce in Mumbai where the most milk is produced in India. I was told Gujarat, but I was drawn to the South. I had brought everything I needed, some citric acid, starter culture, etc., and landed up in Kerala. Then someone spoke to me about Auroville, saying that they made cheese there. I was familiar with the place because I had already read some Sri Aurobindo.

That is how I found myself in Auroville, at La Ferme, and met Olivier. Together we made the underground cheese seasoning room. Then I convinced Olivier to source milk from the village instead of only using milk produced from his 10 cows, since it’s more viable for a cheese factory to produce a bigger quantity.

I went back to Italy and moved to Sardinia, where I had met Monica, and where my three children were eventually born.

During that visit, I started making gorgonzola, again with Olivier, consulting my little book of traditional cheese making methods. Gorgonzola was allegedly an accidental discovery that a cheese maker, about a thousand years ago, stumbled upon by making a mistake in which the cheese got mouldy, in the eponymous town Gorgonzola in Northern Italy. Blue cheese needs holes and air for the mould to grow in it; that is the secret.

During our visit to Auroville the year after, I showed them how to make parmesan.

We finally moved to India in 2008 to start the Auroville adventure. I felt prepared to tackle the challenges that would present themselves in cheese making here. Monica and I both started working at La Ferme. It took three years to obtain the desired results in terms of quality control and the hygiene standards of the milk and facilities.

I only started experimenting with mozzarella in 2010, at home with just ten litres of milk. After all those years of thinking about it the moment had come. A year later, a dear friend of mine from Italy came to help me out. We created a little makeshift cheese lab at home and set up the mozzarella making process.

The real challenge is to source pure quality milk which is undiluted. Diluting milk and wine is a practice that goes back to ancient times, and it is difficult to eradicate. I finally found a good dairy farm to get milk from in southern Pondicherry. I only use buffalo milk. It is much healthier than cow milk and has 7.5% fat compared to the latter’s 3.5%. All the buffaloes in the world descend from these Indian ones, even the Italian buffaloes. During the last Ice Age, all other buffaloes except for the Indian ones went extinct, although we’ve now had them in Italy for more than a thousand years.

What was your vision with the cheese factory?

Before starting this cheese factory, I asked Auroville if there was some farmland where I could keep some buffaloes. One needs at least 40 buffaloes to have a continuous viable milk source. This would yield a minimum of ten litres of milk daily. Anything less than that is just difficult to work with.

We took a lot of time to prepare a detailed business plan, but we were told by various Auroville groups that we first had to complete a course on organic agriculture in order to proceed. Although we already had the competence from our experience in Italy, we went ahead with that, and it took us two years to complete the course. But it feels like we lost a lot of time because that never came to anything: we never got any permission or land we could use. So although we learnt things, different Auroville groups kept making new rules as they went along and the prerequisites kept changing.

The challenge was also that we would have needed 40 acres of land, because for ‘free range’ one acre is required per buffalo, and it is difficult to find such a big piece of land. I almost went crazy through that long process, but finally I gave up.

An alternative solution presented itself when I received a small inheritance from Italy.

The original plan was to have a farm, a factory, and a shop. That is the best way to do it because you can control the quality of the product from beginning to end. But since that did not work out, we found this place, which at the time was a small keet building that had burned down, and was being rebuilt. So we managed to rent it, although it is not part of Auroville.

I’ve added a building to it that I built myself with my inheritance, to have a little working space, a kitchen, and a shop.

Sometimes life turns out very unexpectedly; we started from what was supposed to be the end part of the project, the cheese shop. At times I think it is perhaps better that we did not get the farm because even like this we are so overwhelmed with work that there is no way of getting a day off. I come here even on Sundays. There are things that need to be done every day without exception, just to keep the production going, and with a farm on top of that, with animals to take care of, I think it would just be too much to handle.

It is a real challenge to make this work financially viable, because the competition with the big commercial companies is now so intense that even Auroville units buying our products are not willing to pay more for the quality of this artisanal cheese. This is why we started our own kitchen, to be able to sell our products directly, using our own cheese.

Although what drives me was never the money, the rent and electricity need to be paid, and the Auroville maintenances just do not cover such expenses. I even had to build the furniture for the shop myself to save money. The work is endless. It is a struggle almost every month just to pay all the bills. The objective has become to balance our books and not go into debt, which we often are, even though we are not here to make money.

It is also surprisingly difficult to find someone who is dedicated enough to come and really want to learn the craft and help out. The solution would be for someone to help us invest in a mozzarella making machine. That would change and modernise everything, relieving us of the most time and labour intensive tasks.

I would love to have a place within Auroville so that I would not have to pay rent and electricity to someone on the outside, and worry about maintenance and all of these technical difficulties (at least the assets I’ve created and improved upon would then remain within Auroville), so that I could just focus on making cheese. But in this way, it has become my integral yoga; it is my discipline twice a day, every day. The business is not viable yet, so we do not have an amma, neither here at the unit, nor at home, so my wife and I do all the work and all the cleaning.

So what keeps you here?

My love for Auroville. That’s the reality. But without Monica’s support I would never have made it. Although everything seems harder here, it makes it more interesting, and like The Mother said, Auroville could be only here. We are here to work for the divine, the divine within us, and to manifest it.

I am here because somehow I need to be here, to stay here, and I’m useful here. 80% of the mozzarellas I make, I send to PTDC almost at cost price, and that exchange makes me happy. They take the cheese regularly and it makes people happy to be able to eat such fresh mozzarella three times a week. I truly appreciate the few people who do not mind spending just a little more to enjoy this handmade artisanal cheese. Seeing them happy and appreciating the cheese is all the reward I need. I could live just for this.

Even in Italy nowadays you cannot find truly fresh handmade mozzarella, because nobody is as mad and passionate as I am to be making it by hand any more.

I would like the cheese factory to become a service, at least for PTDC, not only just a commercial unit. Because that is in big part the spirit in which we do things, and it is at times frustrating when people see the shop and think it is all only about business.

My dream is to make an Auroville cheese academy, a place where there would be a school and a small farm, to demonstrate every stage of cheese making and to give a full understanding of the process from beginning to end. There, I could teach all the aspects of cheese making. It takes years to learn everything, even just to develop a refined appreciation for this culinary art. The school could be in an open and raised bamboo structure, and that would be like a live museum where one could see every stage of the process. Guided visits would show the entire history of cheese, from ancient techniques to the most modern techniques…

I’m so passionate and motivated by the art of cheese, I would love to offer this to Auroville.