Parmigiano-style cheeses outside of Italy

[melkor]

You've argued elsewhere on the site that there is no good soft cheese available in the states, you're arguing here that all imported Parmigiano is 'grade C'

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I never said either of those things. I've had amazing soft cheeses made in the US, for example from Bobolink, and have written exactly that on the topic you're referencing. However, I also think the overall state of the soft cheese business is pretty dismal, so I mostly buy hard cheeses. But I don't think we should give up and just buy all our soft cheeses from Europe forever. Eventually, I hope we'll figure out how to do a better job. Don't you hope so too? As for the quality of imported Parmigiano, no, I didn't say it's all C-level. I said most of it is, and surely that's correct. I haven't been to Italy in forever, but as I mentioned above I get occasional hand deliveries from cheese shops in Reggio Emilia and I have never, ever had Parmigiano Reggiano in America that has been as good. I think it's correct to say that most Parmigiano Reggiano sold in the US is C-level, some is B-level, a very little bit of it is what Sam calls high-B-level (that's what you get at the better New York cheese places), and none that I've seen has been A-level. There may be some out there, but if it is out there it's pretty rare because I do get around to a lot of the best cheese shops and it has never crossed my path.

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The overall state of the hard cheese business is pretty dismal as well, the reality is that most cheese is mistreated by grocers and cheese mongers in the states. The same is true for most wine. That the product is handled carelessly both in transit and once it makes it to our shores is a different issue.

Parmigiano, like butter from Normandy, truffles from Alba and Perigord, San Marzano tomatoes, Pinot Noir from Burgundy and countless other things tastes the way it does because of where it's from. Some things speak of place, others don't. Carrots for example taste the same wherever you grow them, grapes - not so much.

[Sentiamo]

Even some Italians muck about with their

parmesan...there was a scandal years ago when one Italian gentleman used grated umbrella handles in his.

Must have been a glut of them at the time.

[melkor]

Even some Italians muck about with their

parmesan...there was a scandal years ago when one Italian gentleman used grated umbrella handles in his.

Must have been a glut of them at the time. 

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What else would you do with an umbrella handle glut?

[slkinsey]

Parmigiano Reggiano is the leading example of an entire category of "grana" cheeses, which are hard aged cheeses characterized by their crystalline structure and granular texture. The Italians of Parma are not the only ones who make this kind of cheese, but nevertheless Parmigiano Reggiano is universally acknowledged as the best of the grana category -- and indeed, many cheeseophiles assert that Parmigiano Reggiano is the best of all the cheeses.

Is it theoretically possible to make similar quality, if not identical grana cheese in America? Of course. But why? What would a cheesemaker gain by doing this? Where is the profit to be made? Where is the commercial will to set up production on a scale that would turn a profit (there is no making Parmigiano Reggiano on Bobolink-sized scale). Making a facsimile Parmigiano Reggiano is not directly comparable to, for example, making American wines because the American wines are unique and distinctive in and of themselves -- they are not facsimile European wines.

Here's the thing: Let's say you learn the method from the experts in Parma, you import Italian equipment and you have your aging facility built to Italian specifications in a location with a fairly similar climate to Parma. This is a place where you can have access to more-or-less the same kind of grass and hay as the Italian cows. Maybe you're able to import over around 200 or so Italian cows and get them to thrive so you can make around 10 wheels a day, but more likely you just use American Holsteins. You only make cheese between May and November. You curdle the milk the same day. You reproduce everything as much as possible on the Italian model. You even hire a guy from the Consorzio to be the in-house quality examiner for your wheels, selling off the stuff that does not pass your standard as a lesser brand. You cut no corners and you do everything right. And, in the end, you might end up with something that is on a similar level of quality with A or high-B level Parmigiano Reggiano. However, just as someone in California duplicating the ingredients and methods of Bordeaux wine makers doesn't end up with a premier cru Bordeaux, it's likely that you a) won't end up with something that truly competes with A level Parmigiano Reggiano, and b) even the stuff you have that competes with B level Parmigiano Reggiano in terms of quality still won't be a taste-a-like. Meanwhile, once you achieve this not-a-taste-alike American grana cheese (after many years of tweaking and refining, needless to say), what are you going to charge for it to make back your investment and turn a profit? How much to you have to under-cut Parmigiano Reggiano, even the C level stuff, to get people to try it?

Edited August 2, 2007 by slkinsey (log)

[tim]

Hi,

The current issue of Cook's Illustrated has an article and tasting of Parmigiano-Reggiano and supermarket parmesan. They explain the Italian process and differences in US production methods. The article makes it clear why the Italian cheese is superior.

It is also clear that Steve and Sam know their stuff.

Cook's Illustrated preferred the regular Parmigiano-Regiano and the Vacche Rosse P-R that they purchased from iGourmet.com

Tim

[slkinsey]

A few interesting things from this article I found on the CI site:

Parmigiano-Reggiano owes much of its flavor to the unpasteurized milk used to produce it, according to Radke [Nancy Radke, U.S. Director of Communications for the Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano-Reggiano]. It is a "controlled-district" cheese, which means not only that it must be made within the boundaries of this zone but also that the milk used to make it and even the grass, hay, and grain fed to the cows that make the milk must come from the district. Consequently, "just like good wine, a lot of character comes from its soil and climate," said Radke. This proved to be true in the tasting. None of the other cheeses had the sweet, nutty, creamy flavor that helped Parmigiano-Reggiano earn its high ratings.

This suggests to me that it's unlikely that an American facsimile cheese could ever have the same flavor profile.

Radke goes on to point out that Parmigiano Reggiano has a much lower salt content, because the wheels are a much larger size and do not absorb as much salt during the 20 day brining period. This means, among other things, that Parmigiano Reggiano can be aged over twice as long as domestic examples. The longer aging leads fo the disginctive crystalline nature of Parmigiano Reggiano, which SI says is the result of "proteins breaking down into free amino acid crystals during the latter half of the aging process," and it also allows more complex flavors and aromas to develop.

The lower salt content also means that Parmigiano Reggiano is more perishable and more suceptable to degradation by drying out once the wheel is cut. This is likely a big part of the reason so many middle-market pre-cut/pre-packaged examples, such as the Connecticut Stop & Shop example Steven makes, are inferior. It also goes a long way towards explaining why the stuff Steven's mother brings home from Italy is so much better (#1, it's probably top quality that never makes it out of Parma, never mind Italy; #2 it comes from a wheel that was broken open the day she bought it, not 6 months earlier like the Stop & Shop sfuff). I always store my Parmigiano Reggiano wrapped in a lightly damp paper towel and sealed inside a heavy duty ziplock bag in the refrigerator to mitigate this problem. But the lesson to learn there is that, if the store isn't splitting their own wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano and turning over the cheese pretty fast, there is only so good the cheese can be.

Domestic producers could, of course, cut their curd smaller, eschew mechanical pressing and make bigger wheels to reduce salinity and allow them to double the agind period. That's not standing in the way of someone stepping up to produce a quality American grana. What is standing in the way is that these things all cost a lot of money to implement, with an uncertain payoff considering the titan they'd be going up against.

I'd actually love to see an American cheesmaker develop a top quality but distinct and unique grana-style cheese. I don't think it would compete with Parmigiano Reggiano for people who want the things Parmigiano Reggiano brings to the table, but it could be delicious and interesting in its own right.

Edited August 2, 2007 by slkinsey (log)

[Peter B Wolf]

Quote : " one Italian gentleman used grated umbrella handles in his. "

I once found a retailer selling 'loose' Paprika,

the story goes he mixed finely ground red bricks, from torn down buildings, into it.

[Torrilin]

Well, that's why I brought up the UW cheese. It ain't Parmigiano Reggiano. Doesn't taste the same. The flavor isn't better or worse, it's different. It blends well with tomatoes (required to meet my desired uses). I haven't tested the behavior with fresh sage and garlic, but I don't anticipate the flavor profile not working there. It works better (IMO) with fruit than parm. If I buy Parmigiano Reggiano, I want it to be the real thing, and of good quality. Getting that even in *this* cheese happy town is kind of a trick. So I buy the grana cheese that gets biked 2 miles from the creamery to my apartment .

It's not like American cheesemakers can't learn the techniques. The UW program is clearly teaching them. So the question becomes, what do the products of a good cheesemaking education make after the semester schedule stops limiting their ripening times? So far all the cheeses I've tried from the creamery have been young. That and college student labor is the reason for the low prices. I don't think the UW program is likely to be the only one in the US that teaches cheesemaking either. So it would be well worth looking around for local cheese if you're in a dairy (or beef) state. You might be surprised at what sorts of tasty things you can get locally.

[slkinsey]

Torrilin, you say that this UW cheese is a "romano" cheese? Is it made from cow milk? Traditionally, romano cheese is made from either goat or, more typically, sheep milk -- thus, Pecorino Romano, a cheese that has the same DOC/PDO protection as Parmigiano Reggiano. Almost all US romano cheeses are made with cow milk, and I think are quite inferior to the sheep and goat milk versions.

Anyway, romano cheeses are made with a special technique called "rummaging" whereby the curds are drained very rapidly and then then the wheel is lightly pierced all over before the cheese is brined. This produces a different texture (romano cheeses are not grana cheeses) and results in a saltier cheese that can be ready after only around 6 months of aging, compared to 24 months typically for Parmigiano Reggiano. Pecorino Romano and the other romano-type cheeses are used mostly as grating cheeses, and they can't compete with Parmigiano Reggiano as a world-class eating cheese. UW probably makes romano-style cheese instead of grana cheese because the production time is so much shorter. It's not clear to me that college experience in making a romano-style cheese would have great applicability to producing a grana cheese.

[Torrilin]

It's unlikely that it's a ewe's milk cheese. It's Wisconsin . Note that I'm comparing it to Parmigiano Reggiano, not Pecorino Romano... the taste and texture of the cheese is much closer to the cow's milk grana than the sheep's milk cheese it's supposed to be imitating. The feel (to me) is that they're using the name of a familiar Italian cheese so the customers have an idea of what to expect. Think US wine producers in 1960 or 1970. This is not a useful practice, but it probably goes along with the immature state of the cheese industry here. Plus, they're less likely to have people screaming that the "romano" is not Pecorrino Romano than they are to have people screaming that "parmesan" is not Parmigiano Reggiano.

The key is that they're teaching the students about a variety of cheeses, and they're choosing ones that will net good results in the time available. This means the students have a baseline of skill that they can develop out of school, and apply to other styles of cheese. A college education is not going to produce a great cheesemaker by itself. And most college students aren't getting a degree in "cheesemaking". They'll be getting degrees in (worst case) food science with a specialization in dairy products or a science degree with a food science minor (best case). Then they'll spend a good 3-5 years getting established and learning more on the job. If they end up in cheesemaking, I'd expect them to be getting *good* 15 years out from graduation.

As with most physical skills, the more you learn and practice, the better you get. You're probably a more skilled musician now than you were at 22. Same goes for chocolate makers and chefs, so I see no reason why it would differ for a cheesemaker.

I should be finding out more about how they manage the creamery program soon. I'm not much of a food scientist (just enough to catch screaming errors, mostly in terms of the care and feeding of taste panels), but I'll have an experienced one visiting, and he's looking forward to picking their brains.

[slkinsey]

Well, like I said, I think it would be interesting to see if an American cheesemaker could produce a distinctive and unique American grana cheese.

As for the UW romano, their literature leads me to believe that it is made using romano techniques and not using grana techniques. Their own desciption says: "Pecorino Romano cheese, made from whole sheep's milk curdled with lamb's rennet, was first imported to the United States from Italy in 1894. Our Romano is made from part-skim cow's milk and is a naturally lower fat cheese. It is brined for 14 days and cured for a minimum of one year. Romano has an extra-hard body, which is crumbly and flaky, and a sharp flavor." This all seems consistent with romano and not grana.

[Fat Guy]

(romano cheeses are not grana cheeses)

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I've never before heard it suggested that Romano isn't a grana cheese. Do you have a source for that? At least according to the Food Lover's Companion:

pecorino cheese

In Italy, cheese made from sheep's milk is known as pecorino . Most of these cheeses are aged and classified as GRANA (hard, granular and sharply flavored)

[slkinsey]

I could be wrong, of course, but I am not familiar with Pecorino Romano being called a grana cheese. "Grana" refers to the finely granular texture, and secondarily to the fact that these cheeses, when grated, result in fine crystalline flakes. This is not the way I would describe Pecorino Romano. Think about breaking apart a wedge of pecorino... it doesn't have that sandy appearance in the broken area the way Parmigiano Reggiano does. The point, regardless of whether I have used the right term to describe it, is that romano cheeses like Pecorino Romano and Pecorino Sardo are not made in the same style or using the same techniques as cheeses like Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano.

In the Cheese Primer, Steven Jenkins says:

Pecorino is a large, oily cylinder of sharp-as-the-devil, aged sheep's milk cheese -- an irreplaceable cheese in the cuisine of southern Italy.  Most weigh around 40 pounds (20 k) and are about 16 inches high, 12 inches in diameter.  The thin, dry rind is the same bone-white color as the paste, although for no apparent reason some cheesemakers paint the rind black.  The intense flavor is peppery, very sheepy, and, to me, overly salty.

[Fat Guy]

Hmm. Okay, we should try to get to the bottom of that. I thought grana just meant any hard cheese suitable for grating. That's why I keep using specific vocabulary -- "Parmigiano-style" -- rather than just saying "grana." I could save some keystrokes otherwise.

I got an email just now from someone who attended the American Cheese Society annual meeting this past weekend, and said there was a Parmigiano-style being tasted that won first place at the US Championship Cheese Contest. Not sure about the absolute level of quality of this product, of course (I've tasted a lot of crap in several cheese categories that has won gold medals in North America), but I guess someone is at least trying to do something in this style. It's called Sartori Reserve SarVecchio Parmesan. I'll try to learn more.

[pkeibel]

The cheese maker is Larry Steckbauer of Sartori Foods in Plymouth Wisconsin and it won the blue ribbon

[Fat Guy]

I've initiated some correspondence with the company and will let you all know where it leads.

[Fat Guy]

So a few weeks ago I emailed the Sartori people to request a product sample of Sartori Reserve SarVecchio Parmesan. Actually I filled out a contact form on the Sartori website.

Usually, when you do this sort of thing and explain that you're a food journalist, a few days later a hundred pounds of the product show up at your house along with a press kit, followed by emails and phone calls from publicists. But I never heard from Sartori at all. So I forgot about the whole thing.

Then, today, I was at Stew Leonard's, the inimitable grocery store in Yonkers, New York. I turned the corner into the cheese section and, lo and behold, there was a gigantic display of Sartori Reserve SarVecchio Parmesan, with a woman offering samples on little toothpicks.

Unfortunately, the woman manning the sample station had no actual knowledge about the cheese. Indeed, she didn't even realize it was a domestic cheese. She just thought it was some different kind of Parmesan from Italy.

I tasted it four times and was pretty impressed. It's a few generations of product away from being as good as really good Parmigiano Reggiano, but it's good stuff and even has the crunchy crystals. I think the cheese I tried had been aged 14 months, at least that's what I recall the label saying. So it had the characteristics of a younger Parmigiano -- it wasn't particularly dry or crumbly. I'd be interested to taste a 24-month sample, if such a thing exists.

The cheese was selling for $8.99 a pound.

[slkinsey]

Just to add a point of data... Fairway's "high B" quality Parmigiano Reggiano was selling for less than $9 a pound the last time I bought some. For "best you can get in the US" quality Parmigiano Reggiano delle Vacche Rosse it's going to cost quite a bit more (probably around $20/lb).

Edited September 2, 2007 by slkinsey (log)

[caseyell]

Twice a year a friend brings me excellent Parmigiano-type cheese from Uruguay. I don't consider it a substitute for the best Italian Parmigiano, but it's still a very nice tasing cheese tha chrunks, grates and melts well.

[Fat Guy]

Just to add a point of data...  Fairway's "high B" quality Parmigiano Reggiano was selling for less than $9 a pound the last time I bought some.  For "best you can get in the US" quality Parmigiano Reggiano delle Vacche Rosse it's going to cost quite a bit more (probably around $20/lb).

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For the past few months, the standard Fairway Parmigiano-Reggiano has been $10.99 a pound and the stravecchio has been $3.79 per quarter pound ($15.16 a pound). The grana Padano has been $8.99 a pound. As a totally informal assessment, having not done a real side-by-side under any sort of controlled circumstances, I think the American stuff I tried at $8.99 a pound was about as good as Fairway's $8.99 a pound grana Padano.

[slkinsey]

Ha! I must have misread the labels. They often put the Padano next to the Parmigiano. Still... 2 bucks a pound strikes me as a pretty small price for that jump in quality.

If we consider that this prize-winning American-made product is approximately as good as high quality fresh Grana Padano (which is to say that it's not competing for parity with high quality fresh Parmigiano Reggiano) and it's only two dollars a pound less expensive... I don't know that that says great things about competing with the Italian product. It sounds to me like the American product will likely cost just as much as Italian product at approximately equivalent quality (which is to say that the people selling crappy, pre-grated or pre-cut dried out Parmigiano Reggiano for 14.95 will probably charge the same amount for equally crappy, pre-grated or pre-cut dried out Sartori Reserve SarVecchio if that product takes off). I'd think that the American product would have to undercut the Italian product of equivalent quality by at least 25% to make significant inroads.

ETA: Has anyone tried Dry Jack? In the Cheese Primer, Steven Jenkins says: "A unique, original American cheese with a depth of flavor nearly rivaling that of Parmigiano-Reggiano. I like to use a mandoline to make heaping piles of feather-light, translucent wafers of this cheese to serve with melon or alongside dry Alalusian sherry of a special bottle of red wine." He lists Vella's Bear Flag Dry Jack as one of America's 25 best cheeses.

Edited September 9, 2007 by slkinsey (log)

[Fat Guy]

That sounds about right to me. And of course the exchange rate situation is probably the only thing that creates a price difference right now. If the dollar goes up 50% relative to the Euro, Parmigiano-Reggiano at Fairway will be back to $8.99 a pound (or less) before you can say "Steve Jenkins."