What Is Stracciatella Cheese?

What is stracciatella? Well, if you happen to be a fan of burrata, you are also, unknowingly, a fan of stracciatella. At least the cheese version of stracciatella. The reality is the word refers to three different kinds of food: a cheese, a soup, and a gelato. Let’s discuss each and see how they encompass the meaning of the word stracciatella.

What does stracciatella mean?

Translated from Italian, stracciatella means “little rag.” That doesn’t sound particularly appealing, especially if your vision of a rag is your dad’s old t-shirt that he now uses to clean his car.

The name is a reference to the appearance of each version of the food: small shreds of its component parts that give the appearance of torn and frayed fabric.

What is stracciatella cheese?

When you cut into burrata, you expose its gooey, cheesy secrets. The innards of the mozzarella casing is stracciatella cheese mixed with heavy cream. 

Stracciatella cheese is made from Italian buffalo milk and is said to originate from the province called Foggia, which is located in the heel section of Italy’s boot-shaped peninsula. 

How do you make stracciatella cheese?

The base for stracciatella cheese is actually fresh mozzarella, so it goes through the same exact process from cow to cheese. After the curds are extracted from the whey, they are heated and stretched to form the traditional strand or ball of mozz you typically find in the grocery store.

It’s at this stage that the stracciatella is shredded, usually by hand, instead of formed into a strand or ball. The stracciatella is then either packaged in cream or used as a stuffing for the mozzarella curd case to form our favorite: burrata.

Stracciatella cheese on its own is best served on crusty bread with tomato, arugula, and a drizzle of balsamic. Just thinking about this combination is making my mouth water.

What is stracciatella gelato?

The jump from cheese to gelato isn’t a stretch; both are milk-based. In fact, a scoop of gelato is not so dissimilar in shape from a ball of burrata (note to self: business idea—burrata on an ice cream cone).

In this case, however, the “little rags” are the streaks of chocolate that run through the vanilla-flavored gelato. While the gelato freezes, it is injected with streaks of warm dark chocolate. This chocolate freezes quickly and, once the frozen mixture is scooped and served, the chocolate shards are reminiscent of little rags—hence the name.

What is stracciatella soup?

We’ve now dealt with cheese and gelato, so does this mean that this soup has dairy in it? Not exactly.

Stracciatella soup is popular in and around Rome. Also known as Italian egg soup, this is a simple dish that only has three basic ingredients: egg, broth, and Parmesan cheese.

Notice that there is no actual stracciatella cheese in this soup. So, why does it share the name? In the process of making the soup, eggs are whisked and mixed with the parmesan. This mixture is then poured into boiling broth. As the eggs are mixed into the broth and cooked, they form the little rags that have an appearance similar to stracciatella cheese.

It’s this soup, in fact, that influenced the naming of stracciatella gelato. It’s a real chicken and egg (soup) situation.

How do you pronounce stracciatella?

If you’ve read through this article and seen the word stracciatella over and over without knowing its pronunciation, you aren’t alone. Lots of letters in this one. The correct pronunciation is strat-chi-ya-TELL-ah.