photo credit: stu_spivack

Gourmet Italian chefs use a tremendous number of tasty cheese in almost every course they serve.  Cave paintings tell us that people have been making cheese since about 5000 B.C..  Since ancient sheep, cows and goats only gave milk part of the year – right after they giving birth each Spring – by the middle of Summer their milk had all dried up.  In order to preserve this milk so that they could eat it in the fall and winter, too – they made it into cheese.

Cheese is made by adding a little rennet to milk and then straining out most of the liquid so that the solid mass remains.  In modern times, rennet from the stomach lining of a calf or any of a variety of vegetables – including the wild cardoon – are used to coagulate the milk and bring about the separation of the curds from the whey.  Have you ever heard of the wild cardoon?  Many gourmet Italian cheeses are started with this unique vegetable that is almost indistinguishable from a globe artichoke and only the heads of the blooming cardoon are used.

Since Italy produces hundreds of different cheese, it is interesting to note that different regions of the country rely on different livestock for the milk to begin the cheesemaking process.  In northern Italian regions such as Piedmont, Lombardy and Liguria, the terrain is better suited to cows – so this regions gourmet Italian cheeses are primarily started with cow’s milk.  Central regions such as Umbria, Abruzzo and Tuscany, as well as southern regions such as Campania, Sicily and Sardinia, have long been the workplace of shepherds, so here sheep’s milk cheeses are the stars of the show.  Goat’s milk cheese and water buffalo cheese are also made.  You will find many buffalo milk cheeses in Italy’s southern regions.

It is not difficult to make your own yogurt or ricotta cheese, but making aged cheese is considerably more difficult.  Our hats are off to Italy for being one of the world’s leading cheese producers!  After all, cheese is almost always one of the stars of the show when making gourmet Italian food!

If you would like more information on making your own cheese, check out my favorite cheesemaking forum here!

Mangia Bene Frommagio!