Ernest Hemingway once said that “it is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, because you have to sweat up the hills and freewheel down them”. It’s a sentiment I’m to hear repeatedly during the course of my two-wheeled meander across central Emilia-Romagna. “To keep these traditions alive - that’s in all of our interests.” “I’d describe it as more of a collective,” he says. Just a few hundred producers in the region are entrusted with the creation of this globally revered product. “It’s probably not good for the cholesterol, but hey.” He gives a happy shrug of indifference. But the 54-year-old is a vital cog in the production of these parmigiano reggiano wheels, and it’s one he manifestly loves. The production technique - which I’ve just witnessed in a series of adjacent rooms here at Hosteria Bertinelli, a cheese producer, deli and restaurant west of Parma in northern Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region - remains markedly unchanged since parmigiano reggiano’s inception: the separation of cheese curds from whey in vast copper vats the shaping in moulds the month-long immersion in salt baths, in which the fleshy wheels glow beneath the briny surface like alien creatures in a dystopian fantasy.įinally, the ageing in a room such as this: a turophile temple where the cheese matures for a minimum of 12 months, and anything up to three years - when it takes on a nutty, crumbly, almost honeycombed quality with which I’m to develop an unhealthy fixation.Īlessandro is not quite il casaro or ‘master’ - the big cheese, if you will. But so sought-after proved their salty, granular and unusually versatile creation, that every stage of this monastic alchemy would ultimately find itself wrapped in a stringent cloak of regulation. Eight centuries ago, when Benedictine monks first began ageing wheels of cow’s milk in a fertile, sun-drenched river valley a couple of dozen miles east of here, it was simply a tentative experiment in food preservation. It’s a Darwinian existence, the world of parmigiano reggiano, but it didn’t start out that way. “You’re listening for a higher pitch,” he says, tapping delicately at the base of the 45kg wheel and squinting as he gauges the reverberations. He spots a suspect, wrestles it expertly down from the shelf onto a wooden stool and sets about it with a hammer. Evenly spaced and immaculately presented, they stand on rows of shelves reaching almost to the ceiling.Īlessandro - the fleece beneath his waxy, army-green lab coat zipped up to the neck against the carefully calibrated cold - is here to sniff out imperfection. Hands clasped firmly behind his back, with the beady vigilance of a parade-ground sergeant major, Alessandro Ferrarini strides among his massed ranks of cheese. This story was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
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