Casciotta d'Urbino

Casciotta d'Urbino DOP is a semi-cooked cheese made throughout the province of Pesaro e Urbino in the northern Marche. It was protected in 1996, in the first group of Italian cheeses recognised by the EU.

The defining feature is the blend: 70 to 80 per cent whole sheep's milk, 20 to 30 per cent whole cow's milk, both from the same area. This is not a shortcut or a cost-saving measure. Sheep's milk brings fat, structure and a lanolin warmth; cow's milk brings sweetness and softens the paste. The result tastes like neither a pecorino nor a cow's milk table cheese.

The shape is a short cylinder with convex, slightly bulging sides: 12 to 16 centimetres across, 5 to 7 tall, weighing between 800 grams and 1.2 kilos. The rind is thin, pale straw-yellow and soft enough to eat.

Ageing is deliberately short: 20 to 30 days at 10 to 14 degrees in high humidity. This is a cheese meant to be eaten young, soft and sweet, and it is not built to mature further. The rennet is calf rennet.

Gentle, and that is the point. The first impression is sweet milk and butter, then a soft sheep's milk warmth arrives underneath without any of the salt-and-sharpness that people expect from an Italian sheep's cheese. There is a faint lactic tang on the finish and a mushroom note from the thin rind, which is edible and worth eating.

The texture is soft but not spreadable: it yields under a finger, slices cleanly, and has a slight moist give that comes from the semi-cooked curd. Scattered irregular eyes, no crumble, no squeak.

If you know Pecorino Toscano fresco, this sits below it in intensity and above a young cow's milk caciotta in depth. It is the cheese to hand someone who says they do not like sheep's cheese, and the one to skip if you want something that fights back.

Mostly, eat it as it is, at room temperature, cut in thick slices. In the Marche it goes with crescia sfogliata, Urbino's flaky griddle flatbread, alongside Carpegna ham and wild greens sautéed with garlic. Those three things on one plate are the province in summary.

It takes honey well, acacia or chestnut, and fresh broad beans in spring. With truffle from Acqualagna, half an hour up the road, it is the standard winter pairing in local restaurants: white truffle in autumn, black in winter.

In cooking it melts creamily without stringing, which makes it good in baked passatelli, over tagliatelle, in savoury tarts and on hot crostini. It stands in for fontina in a lighter fondue and adds body to vegetable fillings without dominating them.

One thing not to do: grate it. The paste is too moist and clogs a grater into a sticky mass. If a recipe wants a hard grating cheese, this is not it.

Fridge, on the least cold shelf, between 4 and 8°C (39 and 46°F), wrapped in greaseproof paper or in the paper it came in. Never film pressed against it: the rind is thin and alive, and under plastic it sweats and takes on the smell of the wrapping.

A whole wheel holds two or three weeks, a cut piece a week or a little more, and the pack carries the dairy's own date. This is not a cheese built to be kept. It was made to be eaten young, and every extra week dries the paste, firms the texture and pushes the acidity forward. When the cut face dries, scrape off a thin veil. White or greyish bloom on the rind comes away with a damp cloth; anything black or pink is a different kind of surface growth, and the shop that sold it is the place to ask.

Half an hour out of the fridge before serving makes an enormous difference on a cheese this delicate: cold, almost nothing comes through. Freezing is not the route, since the moist paste thaws grainy and weeping.

The convex side is the first sign: the flanks of the wheel are not straight but slightly bellied, a consequence of the process that industrial imitations do not reproduce. Diameter should run twelve to sixteen centimetres, weight around a kilo.

The rind is thin, straw yellow, soft and untreated. A thick, hard or waxed rind belongs to a cheese aged much longer, or to another cheese entirely. Cut it and the paste is white to barely straw, soft, with sparse irregular eyes, and it should yield under a finger without springing back. Deep yellow points to more cow milk in the blend or a longer ageing; a chalky paste that breaks instead of bending points to acidification that went off track.

The nose is fresh sheep milk, butter and a background of grass, and the flavour is sweet and mild, low in salt, with a faint acidity at the close. On the wheel or the pack, look for the DOP mark with the dairy number. The word caciotta, spelt with one t and carrying no mark, is free for anyone anywhere to use.

In the Marche it costs 14 to 19 euros a kilo at the dairy and 17 to 23 in a good shop. Since a wheel weighs about a kilo, you buy the whole thing for around twenty euros, which is the right way to buy it.

Elsewhere in Italy expect 20 to 28 euros a kilo. In the US a few specialist importers list it at roughly 16 to 28 dollars per pound; in the UK, 22 to 34 pounds per kilo from Italian delicatessens, with patchy availability, since a cheese aged three weeks does not suit long supply chains.

Production is small and concentrated: a few hundred tonnes a year from a handful of certified dairies clustered between Urbino, Urbania, Sant'Angelo in Vado and Fossombrone.

The trap at the counter is the name. Generic caciotta sells for 8 to 12 euros a kilo and looks almost identical. Check for the DOP mark and the dairy number, and check the sides of the wheel: Casciotta bulges outward, most industrial caciotte have straight sides.

Urbino is the obvious base, and the Palazzo Ducale, with Piero della Francesca's Flagellation and Federico da Montefeltro's inlaid studiolo, justifies the trip on its own. Shops in the old town sell the cheese next to Carpegna ham and crescia.

Urbania, the Casteldurante where Michelangelo bought his farms, has the historic dairies and an old majolica tradition. Sant'Angelo in Vado and Acqualagna are the truffle towns, with fairs filling the streets in October and November.

The Montefeltro hills are worth a day: San Leo, with its fortress on a vertical block of rock, Carpegna and its DOP ham, and the Furlo gorge, where the Romans cut a tunnel through the rock for the Via Flaminia. Several farms in these valleys make cheese on site and sell at the gate.

In Pesaro and Fano the cheese is in every market and deli, and in summer it turns up alongside the coast's fish cooking rather more successfully than you would expect.