Cheese’s top ten

“There’s no other cheese festival as this”, says Davide Scabin. For 4 days, during Cheese – “the shapes of milk” organised by Slow Food in Bra he was the protagonist at Pastificio Felicetti’s stand, together with the dishes of his Combal Zero in Rivoli (a very successful pairing). “I believe there’s nowhere else in Europe, if not in the entire world, where you can find so many cheeses, producers and artisans as in this festival. And there’s also a great quality, despite some isolated exception”.

The quest for the best cheeses in Bra was quite complex: not that high quality products were missing. In fact it was quite the contrary as there were so many you felt lost. This is just a small sample, but it includes 10 cheeses we can recommend without any fear.

Let’s start from abroad, from Spain, in particular. There’s a somewhat extreme cheese coming from the Asturias: it is called Idiazabal de pastor, it is smoked and made with the raw milk of the Lacha sheep. On average, this breed produces half a litre of milk per day, 100 litres in a season. It’s a pity that to produce a wheel of Idiazabal de pastor cheese you need 6 litres. The smoking is delicate and completes an extraordinary cheese, to be paired with a brut cider.

Staying abroad, in England one cannot miss the Cheddar. This time we focus without any hesitation on Montgomery Cheddar, produced in Somerset using raw cow milk from a pasture breeding, matured for 17 months: it is sweet and fat, and there’s a pleasant aroma of grass. In Italy, instead, one of the best products is Castelmagno: the real one, that is… And if you choose a mountain one, with 7 months of maturation, as offered by cheese-maker Quaglia Vittorio in Villafranca Piemonte, it’s going to be a success.

In Lombardy, goats bred in Valcuvia bestow some great satisfaction to Paolo Satta (Aristeo) who offers a Tronchetto di capra rich in scents and with a persistent taste. A pit maturation but without exaggerating is the one used for the excellent Pecorino abruzzese produced by Illuminati Gino in Ancarano, Teramo (tel. +39.0861.815116 and +39.333.2685509) where the balance of a delicate and at the same time tasty cheese is maintained.

The Podolica breed of cows, left in the wild, in Basilicata, offers a very tasty Pastura di pelo di vacca cheese, such as the one produced by Latteria Salvia Maria in Tito, in the province of Potenza. And what happens if the cheese-maker forgets to salt the cheese? This is how the Sicilian Tuma Persa is born: it is salted one month after it is taken out of the wheel, before it is matured for at least 8 months: we recommend the one produced by Custodi dei Sensi in Ragusa.

One shouldn’t focus only on complex cheeses: in its simplicity, Casolet della val di Sole (the one produced by the Pressanella co-op is excellent) is a product you can happily enjoy. Only five cheese-makers, instead, produce Fatulì in Val Saviore, made with the milk from the blond goat of the Adamello mountain, an endangered species, and is then smoked with juniper. Finally, we go back to the mountains to taste Asiago: we recommend the «stravecchio di malga» variety, a Slow Food presidium: you need to wait at least 18 months to taste this delicacy.

And how about cholesterol? What’s important, is that you eat the right amount of cheese, tasting and enjoying the work of these talented cheese-makers.