Marzolino

Marzolino is a soft to semi-hard sheep's milk cheese from Tuscany, tied by name and by season to the month of March. The shape identifies it instantly: not a straight-sided cylinder like standard pecorino toscano, but an ovoid, a flattened egg or a small elongated loaf, weighing from half a kilo to about one and a half.

The rind is the other marker. In the classic Chianti version it is rubbed with tomato concentrate thinned with olive oil, which turns it orange to brick red. Elsewhere producers use oil and ash, or morchia, the thick sediment from the bottom of olive oil.

It is eaten young. Twenty to thirty days is typical, with a white, soft, springy, distinctly sweet paste; some wheels go to sixty or ninety days and firm up, but marzolino is not built for long ageing and does not pretend to be.

What makes it worth seeking out beyond Tuscany is the rennet. Traditionally, marzolino is coagulated with a vegetable rennet made from the dried flowers of the wild cardoon, Cynara cardunculus, exactly as in Portugal and Extremadura. Many producers now use animal rennet, but the farms that kept the cardoon make a sheep's cheese with no animal ingredient in it at all, something close to unique in Italy.

Sweet and lactic, with cream, fresh grass and a faint almond note. This is sheep's milk before it develops any of the sharpness people associate with pecorino: no salt bite, no lanolin, no piquancy. If you have only ever eaten aged pecorino, marzolino will not read as the same animal.

The texture is soft and yielding without being creamy, springy under the knife, and it melts on the tongue rather than crumbling. Cardoon-set wheels are noticeably softer and more soluble in the mouth, and they tend to slump slightly at the centre as they mature.

The cardoon shows up at the finish: a clean vegetal bitterness, herbal rather than harsh, that arrives after the sweetness and lingers for a few seconds. It is the same signature you find in Portuguese Serra da Estrela and Spanish Torta del Casar, and it is the most reliable evidence of which rennet was used. People meeting it for the first time occasionally mistake it for a fault. It is not.

At two or three months the cheese firms up and turns saltier and nuttier, closer to a young pecorino toscano, and the bitterness recedes.

Marzolino is a table cheese, and the correct way to use it is mostly not to. Thick slices, unsalted Tuscan bread, new olive oil, a turn of pepper. With fresh broad beans in April and May, the same month and the same fields, it is a complete course.

It crumbles well over vegetables at the end of cooking: artichokes, peas, wild asparagus, or onto a farro soup or a bread and vegetable zuppa. In spring salads with raw broad beans, mint and oil it holds its own without dominating.

Shaved thin with a peeler over raw baby artichokes, with lemon and oil, it makes one of the simplest and best Tuscan seasonal dishes.

It is not a cooking cheese. Cardoon-set paste in particular melts untidily and turns stringy and sticky. If it must go into a hot dish, add it off the heat at the last moment.

With acacia or chestnut honey, and fig or onion jam, it closes a meal without needing anything else.

In the fridge, wrapped in greaseproof paper inside a container that is not airtight, on the least cold shelf. It holds two or three weeks that way, but the whole point of this cheese is eating it early: after about ten days the paste begins to dry, the texture tightens and the sweetness that makes it worth buying starts to fade. The rind treated with tomato and oil needs to breathe, and cling film pressed against it makes it sweat, with damp growth appearing on the surface within a few days.

If the cut face dries out, scrape a millimetre off and the surface underneath is the one you bought. Dry white bloom comes away with a cloth dampened in vinegar, while green, black or pink growth is an alteration of a different kind, and there the date on the pack and the cheesemaker are the reference. It does not freeze: a fresh soft paste cheese comes back from the freezer as a grainy mass with nothing left of the original. Half an hour out of the fridge before serving is not optional, because cold marzolino has almost no flavour at all.

The oval shape is the first and most reliable sign: a cylinder is not a marzolino, it is a pecorino toscano. The red orange rind of the Chianti version is the second, and it wants a close look, because tomato conserve rubbed on by hand leaves a matte, uneven surface rather than a smooth uniform varnish. Cut, the paste is white, soft without being creamy, with sparse irregular eyes. Wheels set with thistle rennet are visibly slacker and tend to open towards the centre as they age.

The taste is sweet and lactic, with cream and fresh grass. In the thistle versions a clear bitter vegetal note closes the mouthful, and that note is the surest evidence of which rennet went in, so a cheese sold as thistle set with no trace of it is worth asking about. On the label, look for the explicit words caglio vegetale or caglio di cardo, which is also what makes a wheel suitable for vegetarians. The word marzolino on its own implies nothing at all: it is not a protected denomination, and most wheels on sale use animal rennet and are made all year round.

In Tuscany, look for it in cheese shops and farm dairies across the Chianti, the Val d'Elsa and the Sienese hills, at EUR 16 to 24 per kilo for the animal-rennet version and EUR 24 to 32 for cardoon-set artisan wheels. Whole cheeses run from five hundred grams to about a kilo, so buying the whole thing and finishing it within a week is realistic.

Abroad it is uncommon. In the US it appears occasionally through importers of Tuscan cheese at roughly USD 18 to 30 per pound; in the UK, GBP 24 to 36 per kilo at specialist cheesemongers. In both cases the imported version is almost always animal-rennet.

If the cardoon version is the reason you want it, and for vegetarians it is the only reason that matters, you will need to buy in Tuscany or have it shipped, and you should ask the producer directly. Look for 'caglio vegetale' or 'caglio di cardo' on the label, and treat the absence of those words as meaning animal rennet.

One last check: the shape. If it is a cylinder, it is pecorino toscano. Marzolino is an egg.

The Chianti is the heartland: Greve in Chianti with its arcaded square and butchers, Panzano, Radda, Gaiole, Castellina, Castelnuovo Berardenga. Many estates there make sheep's cheese alongside wine and sell at the gate.

West of Florence, the Val d'Elsa hills between Certaldo, Montespertoli and San Gimignano keep the tradition of the marzolino di Lucardo, one of the named historical versions.

South, in the Crete Senesi and the Val d'Orcia, Pienza is the recognised capital of Tuscan sheep's cheese, and the shops there let you taste marzolino next to a row of cylindrical pecorini and understand the difference in one sitting. Volterra and the upper Val di Cecina still have substantial flocks and small dairies working local milk.

Go in March, April or May. The wheels made from that milk are the reason the cheese has its name, and the same weeks bring broad beans, fresh peas and artichokes, everything that belongs beside it.