Can You Safely Eat The 'Skin' On Burrata?

If you've ever cut into a ball of burrata cheese you might have found yourself wondering, "What am I eating?" It's cheese, obviously; but burrata combines so many different textures in a single package that it provokes disbelief from the uninitiated. It's not as simple as cutting a slice of cheddar or parmesan because the best parts are wrapped up inside the skin.

Yes, you should eat the stringy, creamy cheese on the inside. Spread it on toast or veggies or just spoon it into your mouth, but don't forget about its soft outer shell as well. That outer layer is essentially just fresh mozzarella and usually has its own delicious flavor and texture to contrast the burrata's interior.

Of course, this information brings up a wholly different question: "What's the difference between burrata and mozzarella?" If the shell is just mozzarella, then is the inside the only part that's technically burrata? Well, to understand that we have to first understand how mozzarella is made.

Mozzarella is actually an incredibly simple cheese to make — so much so, that you could even make your own at home.

It's most often made by turning raw milk into cheese curds and then working those curds together until they start to form solid strings of cheese. Those solid sections of cheese are then formed into the shape of balls, logs, and braids that you'll find available for purchase from specialty Italian food stores.

Burrata was first invented in Italy's Apulia region in the 1920s by Lorenzo Bianchino Chieppa as a way to capitalize on this process. Once most of the mozzarella had been formed during production, smaller strings of cheese were left behind that couldn't be formed into anything worth selling. So, instead, those strings were combined with cream — which was removed from the milk before it was processed into cheese and then wrapped up into a mozzarella shell — and burrata was invented. This way, nearly all of the byproducts of the mozzarella-making process could be sold for profit.

One way to look at mozzarella and burrata is to compare them with steaks and sausages. Steaks are whole cuts of meat; but, in order to get those cuts, you need to remove a lot of scraps and other parts. So, sausages were invented to make those scraps more appealing and enjoyable.

The same is true for mozzarella and burrata. Mozzarella is a whole block of cheese that creates cream and smaller strings of cheese as byproducts. So, those byproducts are combined and then wrapped inside mozzarella to make something entirely different.

Good mozzarella is going to be a large piece of cheese that can be sliced or shredded to go on a pizza or be used in another dish, while good burrata should be cut open for all of the creamy goodness inside to spill out. You should then enjoy the entire adorable dumpling of the burrata, from its more dense mozzarella "skin" to the cream-soaked string cheese inside.