David Sebastian Boada Mendoza and his mobile laboratory of raw milk
What brought you from Ecuador to Pollenzo in 2010?
In 2008, I moved to France to continue my studies in a cooking and hotel management school. In France, I started discovering a great heritage and diversity of cheese. Then, I moved to Italy thanks to the scholarship I won at UNISG. In addition to allowing me to discover another impressive cheese culture, namely the Italian one, the undergraduate degree in Gastronomic Sceinces and Cultures also gave me a profound vision of different cheese production processes. In short, it gave me a holistic approach to the world of cheese.
Where does your passion for gastronomy come from, precisely that for cheese?
When I first started getting into cheese-making, a universe of questions arose. The gastronomic sciences, from chemistry to history, have given me the tools to continue to deepen my curiosity. Then, the discoveries in the field began. Working with cheesemakers and seasoners in Italy, France, Switzerland, Norway and Ecuador allowed me to grasp the richness behind this product. Thanks to these experiences, the infinite passion and curiosity for cheese and, more precisely, raw milk cheese and its living dimensions has grown in me. It is raw milk cheese, without the addition of commercial starter culture, that best expresses the universe that fascinates me. It represents a cultural universe of connections between living beings (microorganisms, animals, plants, human beings) and places, diversity of knowledge, techniques and tastes.
What was it like opening your own business (especially our itinerant lab), and why did you decide to stop and work in Italy?
Back in Ecuador, for a period in 2017, I started a development activity of natural cheese grafts and maturation, produced in the mountain areas. Then, in 2019, I moved to Corsica to work in a research and development program at the French Agricultural Research Institute for a year. The program aimed to protect the typicality of local cheese and study the effect of using ferments of various origins: self-produced, locally-selected, or industrial.
Continuing - mobile - to get to know the world of cheese while also having the opportunity to share my experiences professionally was the initial push to imagine a laboratory inside a van, a mobile laboratory, useful for constructing a rapid and on-site microbiological and physicochemical diagnosis of milk and cheese. Finalized after eight months of work, in the spring of 2021, I named it Officina del Latte Crudo.
Being a new business, I mainly work in Italy, hoping that with time and work, the paths will lead the Officina del Latte Crudo far and wide.
