Parmigiana Reggiano

So much happened today, I will not be able to fit it in one blog, so I am going to separate our day into types of food. We took an all-day food tour with a company called Amazing Italy, which began with a pick up in front of our apartment at 8 a.m. Our driver Michaele and guide Isabella were friendly and kind.

First up was a small Parmigiana Reggiano producer in the country outside the city of Modena. In order to go into the factory we had to dress up in silly costumes.

The owner and master cheesemaker runs the plant with his wife and three other employees to produce approximately 20 50-kilo wheels of cheese per day, plus all the remaining whey is turned into ricotta.

Here is the owner scooping out fresh ricotta from the reboiled whey. Our tour guides bought some that we would try later (wait for the next blog).

Basic steps to making PR:

Add milk and rennet and salt into giant copper cauldron and heat to correct temperature, then wait for the curds to form and gather it up in giant balls--2 balls to a pot. Allow them to hang for awhile then muscle each ball into a plastic mold with a weight on top to extract more water. 

The next day, stamp the official logos and date of manufacture, then put each wheel in a stainless steel mold to form the official shape. After a couple of days in the mold, put the wheels into a brine (Sicilian salt) where they rest floating around for 20 days. 

Then the wheels get sent to an aging room containing some 7,000 cheeses where they will be brushed off and spun around every two weeks by a robot for anywhere from 15 to 36 months, depending on the level of aging the cheesemaker wants to produce.

At the end of the tour, we gathered outside the plant for a tasting of cheeses aged 15 and 28 months. The younger one was softer and fuller, and the older one was nutty and had a granular texture. Both were excellent with the Lambrusco we drank with our "breakfast."