"Coaxing an unaccommodating nearly feral water buffalo into giving milk and then coagulating the watery fluid into
ambrosial balls of cheese, typically served fresh or imported overnight from Italy, was a challenge that could make a fledgling famer weep...."
Mr. Ramini was just that . He knew nothing about cheese-making and had never milked a cow......but passion and perseverance prevailed...." (below)
Mr. Ramini died of complications of complications of non- Hodgkins lymphoma .
Survivors include his wife
and
forty one water buffalo.
His was a not a long but happy life,
even if fifty seven
is much too soon to go.
hzl
2/10/15
Craig Ramini, a 52-year-old Silicon Valley software consultant at the time, didn’t know his curds from his wheys or a bison from a paesan (and maybe even whether buffaloes had wings or originated in western New York) when he confronted a midlife crisis early in 2009.
“He took a year off and started reading a lot of books and doing a lot of reflecting about what really made him happy,” his wife, Audrey Hitchcock, recalled the other day as she spoke about his death at 57 on Jan. 17 in San Francisco.
For six months, he methodically affixed Post-its to his dining room wall listing his passions. Finally, he narrowed them down to five: being around animals, laboring outdoors, working with food (his grandfather, an Italian immigrant, had owned a restaurant in Connecticut), doing something unique and being an entrepreneur.
“When he laid them all on the table, they spelled cheese,” Ms. Hitchcock recalled.
Not just any old cheese. To fulfill the criterion of singularity, and in keeping with Mr. Ramini’s ethnic roots and the couple’s fondness for humongous animals, he chose mozzarella di bufala.
To cheese aficionados, buffalo mozzarella seductively conjures up a shimmering, porcelain-white, fist-size spheroid with a taut skin cradling a creamy center.
“When cut,” the cheesemonger Steven Jenkins has written, “it will weep its own whey with a sweet, beckoning, lactic aroma.”
Coaxing an unaccommodating, 1,500-pound, nearly feral water buffalo into giving milk and then coagulating the watery fluid into ambrosial balls of cheese, typically served fresh or imported overnight from Italy, was a challenge that could make a fledgling farmer weep, too.
Mr. Ramini was just that. He knew nothing about cheese-making. He had never even milked a cow. An incredulous profile in The New York Times Magazine described him in 2012 as “the latest American adventurer hellbent on making fresh buffalo mozzarella — one of the very few people in the United States currently brave or foolish enough to do so.”
But he and his wife, a residential designer, were undaunted, and their efforts paid off. Last year, their herd of 41 buffalo, most of them named for venerable rock stars, produced about 65 pounds of cheese a week, which sold for $30 a pound in California under the Ramini label.
Ms. Hitchcock said he died of complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center.
She closed the dairy in December, but hopes to reopen it in February.
Craig Alan Ramini was born Nov. 28, 1957, in Burlington, Vt., the son of Dr. Henry Ramini and Leah Mae Hunt, a registered nurse. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his father; three brothers, Michael, Scott and Sean; and a sister, Linda Morris.
He graduated from the University of Vermont, where he studied economics and played shortstop on the varsity baseball team. He worked as a software consultant in Boston and California but, Ms. Hitchcock said, “was always searching for something a little more gratifying.”
With about $100,000 in the bank, he bought five water buffalo; interned briefly at ranches in Canada and Australia; leased a deserted 25-acre dairy near Tomales, about 55 miles north of San Francisco; was tutored by two families from Italy; and recruited a Sicilian coach.
He had a lot to learn. Unlike American buffalo, which are really bison, water buffalo, generally considered native to Asia, are smooth, with curly horns. In contrast to cows, they bark rather than moo. Compared with cow milk, theirs has more protein, fat and calcium and less cholesterol, but the 15 or so pounds of it that they produce every day is less than a third of what a dairy cow can deliver.
“I haven’t met a cheese maker yet who says, ‘That’s a brilliant idea,’ ” Mr. Ramini acknowledged in 2012, his inaugural year, when he produced more publicity than product. (Two-thirds of the 1,500 pounds he made was offered to a grateful local pig farmer, sometimes in exchange for fresh eggs or produce.)
But passion and perseverance prevailed.
“Ramini Mozzarella di Bufala is the only mozzarella I’ve tried, made outside of Italy, that is as good as you get fresh from Campania, Italy,” Louise Franz, the owner of Pizzalina in San Anselmo, Calif., said in an interview. “Their cheese tastes as fresh as the grazing fields of West Marin, and each ball feels like the loving hands that shaped it.”
“And,” she added, “you can taste the love!”
The devotion extended as well to the big-bellied bovids that only a parent could love.
“Whenever Craig or I were asked the question, ‘Do we have children?’ ” Ms. Hitchcock said, “our answer was usually, ‘Yes, 41 water buffalo, because we love them as if they were our children.’ ”
Not so surprising for a man who bucked conformity by actually fulfilling his epiphany, Ms. Hitchcock recalled that her husband frequently quoted the title character in his favorite film, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
“What’s remarkable about his story,” she said, “is that a lot of people out there are unhappy with their careers, but they think with their head, not with their heart. Craig said he would not worry about money or title or status. His heart told him animals, food and nature.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 9, 2015, on page D9 of the New York edition with the headline: Craig Ramini, 57; His Heart Led to Buffalo Mozzarella. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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