Iconic chef Nancy Silverton is adding this vegan cheese to Pizzeria Mozza’s menu
It’s safe to say Nancy Silverton loves mozzarella. Her Michelin-star restaurant Osteria Mozza has an entire mozzarella bar, and her Pizzeria Mozza, known as one of the best pizza restaurants in the country, features the cheese on an array of pies. The James Beard-award-winning chef has appeared on podcasts and in the pages of The New York Times to talk all things mozzarella, even listing out the different kinds of the cheese she uses at her restaurants: buffalo mozzarella imported from Italy, smoked mozzarella, California-made mozzarella, and burrata.
Now, Silverton is adding another kind of cheese to her Pizzeria Mozza menu in Los Angeles: an animal-free mozzarella from New Culture.
New Culture, a San Francisco-based startup, makes mozzarella through a process called precision fermentation: In large fermentation tanks like those at a brewery, microorganisms feed on sugars to produce casein, a protein found in milk that’s crucial to cheesemaking. From there, the company uses traditional cheesemaking processes to mix that casein with ingredients like plant-based fats, salt, and vitamins, and minerals, resulting in a mozzarella without any animal products involved.
Precision fermentation has been around for decades, but startups have been tapping into the technology recently to expedite the transition away from animal products. Companies like Perfect Day, which creates cow-free casein and whey that have been used in ice cream and protein powder; and Onego Bio, which makes a chicken-free egg white, are just a few examples.
New Culture will officially launch its mozzarella in collaboration with Silverton, with Pizzeria Mozza becoming the first restaurant to serve the cheese. That won’t happen until 2024, though: New Culture is looking to expand its manufacturing capabilities before then, and is still working through the regulatory process; the company hopes to get GRAS, or “generally recognized as safe,” approval from the Food and Drug Administration this year.
Once New Culture is ready to appear on Mozza’s menu, it will be available in two pizza options: a traditional margherita and a caponata pizza with eggplant, pickled onions, tomato confit, and caperberries, the fruit of the caper plant. Silverton and New Culture developed the recipes together. They aren’t her first vegan offerings—Pizzeria Mozza currently offers a vegan tomato, oregano, and extra virgin olive oil pie—but it’s the first time Silverton has worked with a non-dairy cheese.
“At Pizzeria Mozza, we always try to accommodate our guests, including those with unique dietary preferences. However, we didn’t always have the right solution,” she says via email. “I’ve always been of the school of thinking that just because it’s a substitute doesn’t mean it needs to be anything less than spectacular. I want customers to have a phenomenal experience no matter what their preferences are, and I know New Culture’s mozzarella will provide that experience.”
Silverton says it wasn’t a challenge to work with the animal-free mozzarella, as it can be grated or pulled apart into chunks; New Culture says its cheese stretches, melts, and tastes like real mozzarella, because it includes casein, the same protein in dairy mozzarella. “My knowledge of plant-based cheeses is limited, so my reference point is really the mozzarella that we use in my restaurants,” Silverton says. “When I tried New Culture’s mozzarella, I was surprised and excited by the integrity of the product and really felt that it lived up to our standards.”
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