Tag: formaggio
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Let’s Talk Cheese: Part 3
Once our ladies have been happily and healthfully fed, during the spring, after they’ve given birth, they give the most milk. Sheep are milked twice per day – every 12 hours, let’s say, at 7 a.m. and again at 7 p.m. Slow food and DOP farms milk by hand. Others use machines to milk their…
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Let’s Talk Cheese: Part 1
Like a fine wine, cheese takes on the terroir, or the natural production environment, where it is produced. So, how does one begin to make excellent tasting cheese? It starts with the animal from where the milk that becomes the cheese comes, but first it starts from the grass and grains that the animal eats.…
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Making Cheese In The Sicilian Countryside
Today during our Myths & Mysteries of Sicily tour we had a fabulous day in the countryside of Palazzo Acreide at a farm making cheese and cooking our Sunday lunch with Alessia of Smile and Food.
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Primo Sale, Before Salt
Preparing the primo sale sheep’s milk cheese for aging…
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Baskets for Heaven
Sheep herding and cheese making has been part of life in Sicily for centuries. The baskets pictured were used for making, molding, and aging sheep milk cheeses such as pecorino, primo sale, and ricotta before modern health codes required plastic imitations to be adopted.
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Cheese in Its Cave
Pecorino cheese aging in Salemi, Trapani province
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A Tisket, A Tasket
In past years before plastic was employed, hand-woven reed baskets like these pictured were used to store and age ricotta, ricotta salata, and other cheeses.
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Basket Weave 101
To make ricotta salata (salted, aged ricotta), the whey of sheep’s milk (i.e., fresh ricotta) is drained, pressed by hand to ensure as much liquid is removed as possible, salted, and then aged in baskets (like this one pictured) for at least 90 days. In the old days, wicker or wood baskets were used, but…