Sometime in the 1920s, Lorenzo Bianchino Chieppa reportedly produced the first burrata while working on a dairy farm in the foothills of the southern end of the Apennines, in the shadow of a picturesque 13th -century castle. Legend has it that because he could not travel to market due to heavy snow, he used the byproducts from the making of mozzarella to create a new cheese.

Workers would blow air into a left-over curd, stretch it out until it was nearly translucent, fill it with cream taken from the top of a morning’s milking, throw some more curd into the cream, then tie its top, and place it in brine (for hygienic reasons, machines now mainly blow up and stretch out the curd, but the process otherwise remains similar).