25-05-2022
Mauricio Couly, a passion for great international cheese, which he reinterprets in Patagonia
Cipolletti is a town of 87K inhabitants in South Argentina, in northern Patagonia. It's famous for its orchards (which are called chacras here), mostly apples and pears, which grow and flourish on the green edge of the river Rio Negro. Lately, it has attracted the attention of wine lovers for some remarkable wine projects, especially Bodega Noemia, owned by Danish Hans Vinding-Diers, and Bodega Chacra, of Italian Piero Incisa della Rocchetta on which we reported here.
Since around ten years ago, the cheese of Mauricio Couly has also turned Cipolletti into a fine culinary destination. The cheese produced at his quesería Ventimiglia, a dairy farm where 50 Jersey cows, 80 goats and some 50 sheep live happily, makes the average national production soar. The latter, for some unknown reason, languishes despite the quantity and quality of the milk produced here (we should remember that in this country there's more cattle than inhabitants and that extensive farming, thanks to the spaces available in this country, is still dominant) which should in fact favour cheese production. The cheese made by Mauricio has nothing to do with the mediocre national production. It is something completely different, cheese with Dutch, French, Swiss, Italian accents: it's by travelling to these countries that Couly trained over the years, working as an apprentice, learning the recipes of the great classics and then returning home to perfect them, adapt them, give them a new take.
Couly's origins are not Tuscan, but Italian and French: his parents come from Occitan, in the South of France, from the city of Aveyron; the surname of his mother, though, used to name the quesería - Ventimiglia – comes from the province of Potenza, from Cersosimo.
For the production of his cheese Mauricio only uses milk produced by his animals, 50 Jersey cows, 80 goats and around 50 sheep
At the beginning of the ageing, the blue cheese is perforated with special metal needles which leave a channel for the air, thus favouring the development of the mould
The resulting product
Feta cheese made by Mauricio, from sheep and goat's milk, refined in barrique barrels filled with 70% brine for at least 60 days
Tasting
Gascony and caramelised peaches
Translated into English by Slawka G. Scarso
Reviews, recommendations and trends from the four corners of the planet, signed by all the authors of Identità Golose
by
born in 1979 in Milan, her mother is from Alto Adige and her father is a Croatian grown up in Trieste: she’s the daughter of Italian irredentism and is strongly attracted by the southern hemisphere. She has written (for Diario and Agrisole among others), translated (includingPellegrino Artusi’sLa scienza in Cucina ), eaten and tasted – without ever stopping taking pictures – in Argentina, Chile and Guatemala for over 5 years. Since she had to move to Italy, she went as south as she could. Since 2016 she lives in Sicily, and collaborates with Wine in Sicily and Identità Golose
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