Gorgonzola

Gorgonzola is a blue-veined cow's milk cheese from northern Italy, protected as a DOP since 1996. The curd is cut coarsely and ladled into moulds without pressing, so air pockets remain between the lumps; Penicillium spores added to the milk colonise those pockets once steel needles pierce the wheel and let oxygen in. That piercing, done once for dolce and two or three times for piccante, is what creates the veins.

Wheels weigh 9 to 13 kilos and are wrapped in embossed foil carrying the Consorzio's stylised 'g' and the dairy's number. The cheese comes from fifteen provinces across Lombardy and Piedmont, with the modern production centre around Novara rather than the Milanese town that gave it its name.

The single most useful thing to know is that dolce and piccante are separate products, not stages of the same one. Ask which you are buying.

Gorgonzola dolce is soft, almost spoonable, milky and buttery, with a gentle mushroomy tang and a faint bitterness at the finish. It is one of the mildest blue cheeses in Europe, and people who dislike Roquefort often like this. The blue reads as savoury rather than sharp.

Gorgonzola piccante is a different proposition: drier, crumblier, distinctly salty, with a peppery bite and a long spicy finish. It is closer in intensity to Stilton, though earthier and less mineral.

Both have a strong smell relative to their taste, and both need half an hour out of the fridge to open up. Cold gorgonzola tastes mostly of salt.

Take it out of the fridge thirty minutes before serving and unwrap it, because cold gorgonzola tastes only of salt, and it needs air. Cut off the rind; it is not meant to be eaten.

For a pasta or gnocchi sauce, use dolce: melt 100 g per two servings into 60 ml of cream or milk over low heat, off the boil, and finish with black pepper and a splash of pasta water. It goes very liquid, so if you want a clinging sauce, whisk in an egg yolk off the heat or a spoonful of mashed potato. Piccante is the one for polenta, for a pan sauce on steak, and for pizza with walnuts and honey.

On a board, serve it with chestnut honey, walnuts, pears and mostarda. The classic Lombard preparation is gorgonzola layered with mascarpone: mild, rich and startlingly good on toasted bread.

Keep it in the fridge between 2 and 6 °C, wrapped in its own foil or in waxed paper. Cling film pressed against the surface is the one thing to avoid: the cheese keeps exchanging gases as it matures, and sealed against plastic it develops an ammonia note within days. On a cut piece, cover the cut face and leave the rind exposed to the air. A lidded box keeps the smell away from the rest of the fridge, but open it every couple of days so the air moves.

Dolce is generally sold to be used within about ten days of cutting, piccante holds three weeks or more, and the date on the wrapper is the reference rather than the look of it. Across that time the paste keeps softening and spreading, the veining shifts from blue-green towards grey, and the cut face dries where it meets the air. Freezing only makes sense for cheese headed into a cooked sauce: 100 gram pieces, up to three months, and it thaws grainy and crumbly.

Start with the wrapper. Real Gorgonzola arrives in foil printed with the stylised letter g of the Consorzio and the number of the dairy that made it, and on a half or quarter wheel the same mark is branded into one of the cut faces. Two cheeses hide behind the single name: dolce is white to pale straw, soft enough to spread, with sparse blue-green veins scattered unevenly; piccante is drier, ivory, firmer and marbled densely and evenly right through. In both the veining should read green or blue, and the wrinkled pink-grey rind is trimmed away rather than served.

At a British or American counter the neighbours are different animals. Danish Blue is whiter, firmer, saltier and evenly veined; Cambozola is a mild brie-blue hybrid with a white bloomy rind; Roquefort is sheep's milk; Stilton is crumbly and dry rather than spoonable. Domestic blues sold as gorgonzola-style crumble instead of spreading, and sit well below the imported DOP wheel on price.

In the US, Whole Foods, Wegmans, Costco and Italian delis all carry it, though many stock only one version, usually a mild dolce sold simply as 'gorgonzola'. Ask, or read the foil. Igor, Palzola and Mauri are the names most often imported. Expect $10-19 per pound depending on type.

In the UK, Waitrose, Sainsbury's, Ocado and cheesemongers stock both types at roughly £14-22 per kilo. Piccante is harder to find in supermarkets and easier at a counter.

The check is the foil: embossed with a stylised 'g' and the dairy's identification number. Cut pieces should carry the fire-branded mark on one face. Look for veins that are green or blue, never grey or brown, and pass on anything that smells of ammonia through the paste rather than only at the rind.

The town of Gorgonzola, twenty minutes east of Milan on the metro, holds a cheese festival every September and keeps the signs of its old dairies along the canal. It is more pilgrimage than gastronomy, but the festival is real.

Novara, now the production capital, runs an autumn showcase where the region's dairies pour side-by-side tastings of dolce and piccante. Several producers in the Novarese and the Valsesia open their ripening cellars, and watching the piercing needles go in explains the cheese faster than any description.

In Milan, the cheese shops around Porta Romana and the market on via Fauché carry intermediate ageings that never reach supermarkets: a 90-day dolce, or a piccante pushed past six months.