Caciocavallo Podolico

Caciocavallo Podolico is a raw cow's milk pasta filata cheese from the southern Apennines, shaped like a pear with a small neck formed by the tying cord, weighing one and a half to three kilos. Larger formats exist for extreme ageing.

The Podolica is an ancient grey breed that reached southern Italy centuries ago from the steppes of eastern Europe. It is a working and beef animal: hardy, able to live outdoors year-round on very poor pasture and to walk long distances to water. As a dairy animal it is close to useless: five to eight litres a day at peak, against thirty or forty from a Holstein.

And it does not give even that willingly. A Podolica cow will not let her milk down without her calf present; the herdsman milks by hand, after the calf has fed, and takes what is left. Milking is therefore short, manual and strictly seasonal, concentrated in the weeks when the mountain pasture peaks, broadly May to July.

That single fact explains the price, the scarcity, the seasonality and the flavour. Wild pasture at altitude puts an enormous range of aromatic compounds into the milk, and none of it can be reproduced in a shed. The best wheels age from one to five years; a few reach ten.

Nothing else in the cow's milk world tastes like this, which is the reason people pay for it. A well-aged wheel opens with browned butter and toasted hazelnut, then moves through candied citrus peel, dried figs and mountain herbs, with something floral underneath that people usually reach for chestnut honey to describe.

The texture is dense and slightly granular, breaking into shards rather than slices, with crunchy crystals in older wheels. The paste is properly yellow, from carotenoids in grazed grass, not the pale cream of a shed-fed cheese.

The kid rennet arrives last: a piquancy that builds slowly and stays, closer to an aged provolone piccante than to anything sharp and immediate. Salt is moderate and never leads. Young wheels of three to six months are a simpler cheese (sweet, milky, springy, good on a grill) at a fraction of the price.

A twelve to eighteen month wheel should be eaten and nothing else. Break it into irregular shards with a knife point, bring it to room temperature half an hour beforehand, and serve it with bread, pears and walnuts. Cooking it is usually a waste of money.

Young wheels of three to six months are the ones that belong in the kitchen. Grill thick slices on a dry pan until they crust, or melt them over roasted peppers and potatoes. In Cilento they go into baked pasta and stuffed dishes; in Basilicata the aged version is grated over ferricelli with mutton ragù.

Wheels past three years become luxury grating cheeses. A few grams over a bean soup or a vegetable pasta is enough: the flavour is concentrated and the piquancy long.

As with every stretched-curd cheese, keep it away from a rolling boil: add it off the heat, or the fat separates. And serve it with something plain: this is a cheese that loses an argument with strong flavours.

In the fridge, on the least cold shelf, wrapped in greaseproof paper inside a container that is not airtight, so the cheese can breathe without drying out. Long-aged wheels lose aroma in cold air, so a piece you will finish within a week sits better in a cool room at 12 to 15°C (54 to 59°F).

The cut face dries and goes glassy within days as moisture leaves it; scrape off a millimetre before serving and the paste behind it is unchanged. Dry white bloom on the rind is normal on aged cheese and comes away with a cloth dipped in vinegar. Anything green, black or damp on the rind is a different kind of surface growth, and a question for whoever sold you the piece.

A whole wheel keeps hanging, the way it hangs in the dairy, drying and concentrating for years; turn it occasionally and look under the cord, where moisture collects. It does not go in the freezer: ice crystals break the stretched-curd structure, and what thaws is a different cheese.

With this cheese you check the producer before you check the cheese. Ask the name of the farm, where the cows graze, which months they milk, how many wheels come out in a year. Anyone working true Podolica answers with small, precise numbers.

On the wheel: the rind is thin and smooth when young, hard, cracked and amber with age, the little head sits asymmetrically, and the marks of the cord show. Hand-made wheels are never identical to one another. Cut it and the paste of an aged Podolico is yellow, properly yellow rather than straw, from the carotenoids in pasture grass. A caciocavallo made from indoor milk on silage and feed stays white or barely cream even after two years, and that is the hardest clue to fake without colouring.

The nose runs to cooked butter, dried fruit, citrus, mountain herbs, sometimes something close to chestnut honey. An industrial caciocavallo smells of milk and stops. Price is the blunt filter: below about 30 euro a kilo, or 15 dollars a pound, the farming arithmetic does not work.

Assume it is hard to find, and treat easy availability as a warning sign. In Italy, buy from the producers themselves in Basilicata, Cilento or the Gargano, or from a small number of serious cheese shops that name their dairy. Expect EUR 40 to 50 per kilo at twelve months, EUR 55 to 70 at two to three years, over EUR 80 beyond five.

In the US it arrives in tiny quantities through specialist importers, at roughly USD 35 to 70 per pound. In the UK, expect GBP 60 to 110 per kilo from Italian importers and top cheesemongers.

Before paying, ask four questions: which farm, where the cattle graze, which months they milk, and how many wheels a year. A real producer answers with small precise numbers. Then look at the paste (an aged podolico is yellow, because the cows ate grass) and at the price. Below EUR 30 per kilo, it is not podolico, and the arithmetic of the breed makes that a certainty rather than a suspicion.

The Slow Food Presidia covering podolico production in Cilento, the Alburni hills, Basilicata and the Gargano keep named lists of producers, and in the absence of a DOP they are the most reliable check available.

In Basilicata: the Pollino massif around Rotonda, Terranova di Pollino and San Severino Lucano; the Val d'Agri around Moliterno, Marsico and Viggiano; the Vulture around Melfi, Rionero and Atella. Buy at the farm, or at the handful of shops in Potenza and Matera that work directly with herdsmen.

In Campania, the inner Cilento (Sacco, Roscigno, Sanza, Piaggine) and the Alburni mountains hold the densest concentration of Presidium producers, with Castel San Lorenzo, the Vallo di Diano and the Laceno plateau in Irpinia completing the picture. On the Gargano, between Monte Sant'Angelo, Vico del Gargano and the Foresta Umbra, a distinct local podolica line produces its own version.

Go in autumn. Wheels made from the May and June milk have had enough cellar time to show what they are, and the cheesemakers still have a choice of ages before the Christmas orders clear them out.