The Rise and Fall of Burrata | The Cheese Professor

Burrata with peaches photo credit Depositphotos

Few cheeses have experienced a meteoric rise like burrata. Once a regional specialty found primarily in Puglia, the “heel” of Italy’s 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—originally created as a way to minimize food waste—has 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?

Burrata Mania

Burrata with tomatoes and pesto photo credit Sebastian Coman Photography

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’d 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 Instagram account, with its 123,000 followers, had yet to be launched.

“It became a sort of mania, from maybe 2010 on,” says Juliana Uruburu, the retail director at Oakland’s Market Hall Foods. 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. “People had to have it, burrata, and we’d sell out our whole order so quickly. People would yell at us, ‘Why didn’t you get more?’ We’d propose some other cheeses they could use in the same dish, but, no, it was burrata or nothing. They’d get emotional about it.”

Burrata with tomato, basil and bread photo credit Depositphotos

In the thick of the burrata boom, Di Stefano, the Southern California firm run by the family whose patriarch brought the cheese to America, struggled to keep up with demand. “It was crazy, sometimes 50 to 60 percent growth per year,” says Stefano Bruno, one of five brothers who manage the cheesemaker founded by their father Mimmo.

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. “There’s 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,” shares Uruburu.

I once asked the chef-owner of San Francisco’s 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, “Don’t say I make burrata, please. The burrata people are insane, they’ll come stampede me.” (The cheese can be made with buffalo milk but is more often made with cows’ milk.)

The Backlash

This sort of boom tends to beget a backlash – and one duly came, led by snarky, over-it food writers. New York Times critic Pete Wells sniffed, “Anyone can slap a burrata on a plate and wait for the moaning to start.”

“A Big Fat Blob of Boring” was the headline New York Magazine 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 “green-markety.” Comparing it to the kale Caesar, she wrote, “Burrata has overstayed its welcome.”

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Time Out carped, “Why the f*ck is there so much burrata in London?”

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.

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’ve moved on from burrata. That said, the backlash was never against burrata per se, only against unimaginative uses of it. “Only someone with lactose intolerance could consider burrata to be ‘bad’,” Teclemariam wrote, near the end of her Burrata-is-boring takedown. “But all too often it’s predictable … serviceable, and totally uninspiring. I don’t blame restaurateurs … for banking on easy crowd-pleasers, but I find myself wishing more people would try to do something different.”

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.