Left to right: Pecorino Foglie di Noce, Bufarolo, Bocconcino di Capra, Camembert di Bufala, Fontina Valle d’Aosta, Furmai di Suna, Robiola Bosina, Pecorino Marzolino, La Granda
by Austin Coe Butler
What I love most about Italian cheeses is how playful and varied they are. Each region, valley, and village has their own distinct cheese they’ve made for centuries, if not millennia. They are too vast and many for me to praise all of them, so instead I’d like to take you on a sprint through Italy, from the north to the south, while mentioning a few cheeses we carry in the shop that will tell us something about the country and you can try along the way.
Much of Italy’s cheese culture and variety stems from the north, and so much of the cheese in our case comes from here: Piedmont, Lombardy, Valle d’Aosta. Girdled by the Alps and flanked by the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic Seas, the immense climatic and geographic diversity of northern Italy offers endless opportunities for locals to create both large wheels of hearty mountain cheese and delicate soft bloomy-rinded cheeses. Formaggi alpeggio, or cow’s milk alpine cheeses, like Fontina, Asiago, and Furmai de Suna reflect the millennia old tradition of transhumance or transumanza, the practice of taking livestock up into the high altitude meadows to graze freely on fresh grasses and flowers.
Furmai de Suna, a new addition to the case, is a style of cheese known as Bitto and is a true formaggi alpeggio. It’s made at over 6,500 feet between mid-June and mid-September by the Bongiovatti family in their calec or malghe, a squat, stone shelter that serves as a seasonal dairy. They make only four wheels of cheese a day in a copper cauldron over a wood fire from the fresh, raw milk of their forty-five cows. The cheese has a remarkable flavor like dry cured salame and pepper reminiscent of soppressata.
Fontina Valle d’Aosta is unrecognizable from the cheap, mass-produced Fontina, Fontinella, and Fontal sold in supermarkets and all billed as “Fontina.” Real Valdoastan Fontina is earthy, mushroomy, and tastes of rich, raw milk with a fudgey, pliant texture. It is as good on your cheeseboard as it is melted in hot-dish or fonduta. Another cheese from the north, Toma La Granda with its bright, buttery flavor and elastic paste has won the Slow Food Master of Taste Award five years in a row.
The cool, damp climate provided by the Alps created the perfect environment for delicate, moist cheeses like Taleggio and Robiolas to thrive in caves and cellars. This environment invites molds and funghi to colonize the rinds of cheeses like Robiola Bosina or Camembert di Bufala or bloom within blue cheeses like Gorgonzola. It also encourages the bacteria that give salty, meaty washed-rind cheeses like Taleggio and Nababbo, a goat’s milk play on Taleggio, their characteristic funk.
As the Alps recede and the lush Po River valley opens into the northern plain of Emiglia-Romagna, we enter the kingdom of grana cheeses like Grana Padano and the King of Cheese, Parmigiano Reggiano. These enormous, nutty cheeses share the legacy of alpine cheesemaking techniques (cooking, pressing, brining, aging) blended with their monastic roots of Cistercian monks who used the abundant salt of the brackish marshes of the Po Valley to create a cheese which could easily be aged two, three, four, or even more years in their monasteries, which yield the nutty, crystally, complex cheese we love. Our Parmigiano Reggiano is given the highest distinction of produtti di montagni (made in the Appenine mountains) in Emilia-Romagna and aged by Giorgio Cravero in Bra, Piedmont. And while Giorgio’s Parmigiano Reggiano is fabulous grated onto pasta, we implore you to savor a hunk of it on your cheese board with a flute of Prosecco.
Near the heart of Italy, the story changes. The drier hills and valleys of the Apennine mountains come into view and the Tuscan sun and Mediterranean climate takes hold. Here we see traditions based on pastoralism or shepherding, and the classic Pecorinos (sheep’s milk cheeses) of Italy with their rustic, intense, aromatic, and full-bodied flavors are king. Pecorinos should not be thought of as identical, but as territorials–each region and village has their own distinct style. The saltier, spicier Pecorino Romano, favored by Roman legionaries, lacks the more mature, nuanced, and nutty flavors of Pecorino Foglie di Noce, which are wrapped in young walnut leaves that impart an herbaceous, earthy quality; the firm, tenacious Pecorino Toscano of the elusive and inscrutable Etruscans differs from the velvety, lemony tang of Pecorino Marzolino, a younger cheese that is made only in March (Marzo) and rubbed with olive oil and tomatoes to give its rind a distinctive red glow.
Further south, the pasta filata or “spun paste” cheeses like mozzarella are found. These cheeses are made by melting the curd with boiling water until a single mass coalesces that can be stretched and shaped. Pasta filata cheeses include not just fresh cheeses like Buffalo Mozzarella, Fior di Latte (cow’s milk mozzarella), or Burrata, but also firmer, aged cheeses such as Caciocavallo, Scamorza, and Provolone. Burrata, which was only invented in the 1950s in Puglia, is one of the younger arrivals to Italy. And here we arrive again at our shop in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where we make both fresh Fior di Latte and Burrata on Friday and Saturday mornings.
Stop by this weekend to celebrate Italian cheeses with us. If you’ve read this whole post and would like to learn more about Italian cheeses, you may be interested in our upcoming class on northern Italian cheese and wine at the Harriet Place on July 7th!