Parmesan overkill?

[Lesley C]

Hi Mario,

Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions.

I’ve been watching you cook for years up here in Montreal, and remember the first time I saw a rather reserved Mario Batali on TV with Martha Stewart. I kept asking myself: “Is he really wearing shorts?”

Anyway, here’s the big question: Am I imagining things or are you set on drawing viewers away form the parmesan habit in order to discover different Italian cheeses?

In books like The River Café series, recipes are often topped off with a whopping amount of parmesan, whereas you seem to favour other cheeses, specifically Pecorino Romano. Do you think different pasta dishes call for specific “finishing” cheeses, and if so what should we be stocking in our refrigerators aside from the usual Parmigiano and Pecorino?

In the Babbo cookbook there are several pasta recipes that don’t call for any cheese, such as the Spaghetti with Sweet 100 tomatoes. Are we drowning our pastas in too much cheese?

And lastly, are you dead set on Parmigiano-Reggiano or would you be just as happy using Grana padano? Perhaps more so for cooking than eating staight up?

[Mario Batali]

parmigiano reggiano is the indisputed king of cheeses and perhaps my fave for a minute on any given day, but the habit of putting parm on all pastas, even in the most heinous form, over delicate seafood pastas, is a strictly american phenomenon and one i am not down with some pastas need no cheese or suffer malicious misemphasis on the wrong nuance, or the lack thereof under the lactic vesuvius i have seen in many restaurants and on many plates of innocent noodles... there are hundreds of great cheeses out there, the birth region of the pasta on plate should be the birth region of the cheese over the top of it and easy on the blizzard mb