Pecorino Crotonese

Pecorino Crotonese is a whole sheep's milk cheese coagulated with kid rennet paste and drained in rush baskets that print their weave onto the rind. Wheels are cylindrical with flat faces and weigh from half a kilo to five.

The DOP is recent, granted by the EU in 2014, for a very old cheese. The zone covers the entire province of Crotone plus a number of municipalities in the provinces of Catanzaro and Cosenza: in practice, the whole vertical strip from the Sila plateau down to the Ionian Sea.

The rules define three types, and the distinction is worth taking seriously. Fresco, a few weeks old, is white, springy, sweet and still moist. Semiduro, two to six months, is the table cheese: straw-coloured, firm, with the piquancy just beginning. Stagionato, over six months and often well beyond, turns hard, yellow and granular, with a clear building sharpness that comes from the kid rennet.

The milk comes from Gentile di Puglia, Comisana and Sarda ewes and their crosses, all pasture-grazed. Some dairies work raw milk, others thermised; the rules allow both, and the difference shows most in the long-aged wheels.

Sheep's milk without the barnyard. The fresh type tastes of warm milk, yoghurt and cut grass, with a squeaky, elastic bite and almost no salt, closer to a young Spanish or Sicilian fresh sheep cheese than to anything Roman.

At three to five months it fills out: butter, toasted almond, dry hay, a faint bitterness from the oiled rind, and a warmth at the back of the palate that is the kid rennet starting to work. This is the age most people find the most useful, and it slices cleanly.

Past eight or ten months it turns hard and flaking, the colour deepens to yellow, tyrosine crystals appear, and the piquancy becomes a real peppery finish that lingers. Even then the salt stays moderate, roughly half what Pecorino Romano carries, which is why it can be eaten in quantity rather than used purely as a seasoning. Wheels made in summer, when the flocks are up on the Sila, carry a distinctly herbal note that winter wheels do not.

Fresco is a slicing and grilling cheese. Cut it thick, cook it on a dry hot pan until it crusts and the inside softens, and eat it with bread and oil, or with broad beans in spring and tomatoes in summer. It also goes into Calabrian frittate and stuffed savoury pies.

Semiduro is the board cheese and the one to pair with 'nduja: the spicy spreadable sausage and the firm salty sheep cheese hold each other up. Shave it over vegetables, work it into meatballs, layer it into stuffed aubergines.

Stagionato grates. It is milder and sweeter than Pecorino Romano, so you can be generous, but you must then salt the pasta water and the sauce yourself. It belongs on maccheroni al ferretto with goat ragù, on pasta with fried breadcrumbs, over bean soups, and on roasted Sila potatoes with oil and oregano.

Like all semi-cooked sheep cheeses it does not melt gracefully. Add it off the heat, or use it under a grill where it gratinates rather than strings.

Three cheeses, three clocks. The fresh one is a ten-day piece, the semi-hard runs a good month, and the aged holds two or three and goes on maturing slowly while it sits. All of them go in the least cold part of the refrigerator, wrapped in waxed paper or a slightly damp cloth. Plastic film against an oiled rind makes it sweat, which is the one wrapping to skip. Whole aged wheels are kept differently, in a cellar between 8 and 12 degrees, turned and rubbed with oil every two or three weeks.

What you see over time is drying. The cut face goes glassy and darker, and a millimetre scraped off brings back the fresh surface underneath; the wedge as a whole loses weight, hardens, flakes rather than slices, and tastes saltier and sharper because everything in it is more concentrated. Freezing suits only cheese headed for the grater, in small chunks and for no more than six months; frozen young Crotonese thaws grainy and loses the springiness that is the point of it. Dates belong to the label and the dairy.

The rind gives it away. A real one is shaped in a rush basket, so the marks are irregular lines of uneven depth rather than the neat grid of a plastic mould, and the colour runs from dirty white on young wheels to dark amber on aged ones rubbed with oil. Cut it and the stage is obvious: the young cheese is white, slightly springy and sparsely holed, the semi-hard pale straw and compact, the aged yellow, hard, flaking, sometimes with crunchy crystals. It should smell of clean sheep and hay, with dried fruit and cooked butter on older wheels.

Salt is the giveaway in the mouth. Crotonese is moderately salted, well below Pecorino Romano, and its heat climbs slowly, so a cheese that arrives salty and aggressive on the first bite is a different one. On the label look for Pecorino Crotonese DOP and the ageing category; the denomination is recent, and a great deal of generic pecorino calabrese is still sold alongside it. American delis often stock a semi-hard sheep cheese called Crotonese, which may or may not be the DOP. Expect 15 to 25 dollars a pound.

This is a hard cheese to find outside Calabria, and the DOP is young enough that even Italian counters may not stock it. Look for the full wording Pecorino Crotonese DOP plus the type (fresco, semiduro or stagionato) printed on the label.

In Italy, buy in Crotone and its hinterland, in the Sila villages, or online from the certified dairies. Expect EUR 10 to 14 per kilo for fresco, EUR 14 to 19 for semiduro, EUR 18 to 28 for stagionato, and up to EUR 34 for wheels held eighteen to twenty-four months.

In the US, importers specialising in Calabrian products carry it occasionally at roughly USD 14 to 24 per pound; ask at Italian specialists rather than expecting it in a supermarket. In the UK, GBP 20 to 32 per kilo from Italian delicatessens and online importers.

At the counter, check the rind for the irregular imprint of a hand-woven rush basket, and ask which season the wheel was made in. Summer milk from the Sila and winter milk from the Marchesato produce noticeably different cheeses, and a good seller will know which one they are selling.

Crotone and its hinterland are the obvious base. Santa Severina, a hilltop village with a Norman castle, is among the finest in Calabria; Cutro, Isola Capo Rizzuto, Verzino and Savelli fill in the map inland.

Up on the plateau, San Giovanni in Fiore, the largest town in the Sila, founded around the abbey of the mystic Joachim of Fiore, is where the mountain dairies are. Camigliatello Silano and Lorica, on the lakes, are the tourist bases, with shops that carry the DOP alongside Sila potatoes and porcini.

The Marchesato, the belt of bare clay hills between the plateau and the sea, is the winter landscape of the flocks: empty, treeless, dotted with isolated farms that sell directly.

And go to Capo Colonna outside Crotone, where a single standing column of the temple of Hera Lacinia looks over the Ionian. It sits a few kilometres from the pastures, and it makes the age of this particular sheep-farming economy very easy to grasp.