Italian Regional Cheeses
You can match your choice of cheese to a minestrone typical of a region, or to your taste. Cheese with a hearty soup should be bold enough to hold their own at the table. It is a nicety, in consideration of a diversity of taste preferences, that you offer a firm, a semi-soft, and a soft cheese. There exists an endless array of regional cheese from Italy.
These are three of the better known regional cheeses that are unfailingly enjoyable.
Parmigiano Reggiano is well loved for good reasons. The firm, cow’s milk cheese is imminently versatile, as a table cheese for munching, and as a grated cheese for soups, on plates of steaming pasta, in baked pasta like lasagna and stuffed shells, in Caesar salad. A true Parmigiano Reggiano, aged no less than a year, is produced in an 84 pound wheel and has a granular texture often speckled with tiny crystals that cleaves into hunks and chunks. Don’t forget to save the rind for adding a punch of umami to soups.
Gorgonzola dolce, a Protected Designation of Origin (DOP) cow’s milk blue cheese, produced in the Piedmont and Lombardy regions of northern Italy. When young (dolce) the blue veined semi-soft cheese is slightly sweet, nutty and salty-tangy. When aged (picante) the cheese is more firm, and the flavors, and aromas are more intense.
Famous since the days of ancient Rome, and named for the Alpine valley in Lombardy, Val Taleggio, soft-ripened Taleggio, is one of the world’s greatest cheeses. Made from cow’s milk in and around Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona and Como, it is square with a thin pale brownish-pink colored, stinky, inedible washed rind. Don’t let that fool you. Beneath is a mild, somewhat salty, ineffably delightful, ivory colored core (or paste, as the cheese makers, say). At room temperature it is almost spreadable.