Piacentinu Ennese

Piacentinu Ennese DOP is made from raw sheep's milk in a handful of towns in the province of Enna, in the middle of Sicily: Enna itself, Aidone, Assoro, Barrafranca, Calascibetta, Piazza Armerina, Pietraperzia, Valguarnera Caropepe and Villarosa. It was protected in 2011.

The form is a flat-faced cylinder, 20 to 21 centimetres across and 14 to 15 tall, weighing around four kilos. The rind carries the woven imprint of the rush basket it was pressed in: it is a canestrato cheese, like most Sicilian pecorini.

Two things make it unmistakable. First the colour: saffron, dissolved in milk before the curd sets, turns the paste a deep, even yellow that no sheep's cheese reaches on its own. Second the peppercorns, added whole to the curd and left whole in the finished cheese, appearing as black dots across every cut face.

The milk comes from Comisana, Pinzirita and Valle del Belice sheep grazing the interior. The rennet is lamb paste. Minimum ageing is 60 days, but the best wheels go to six months and beyond, at which point the saffron stops reading as a perfume and becomes part of the structure of the flavour.

Sheep's milk first: warm, lanolin-rich, faintly sweet, with the clean savoury weight of a young pecorino. Then the saffron arrives, and it is not what most people expect. Saffron in a cheese does not taste floral or perfumed; it tastes of hay, bitter honey and something metallic and medicinal, and against sheep's milk that bitterness works as a counterweight rather than a decoration.

The pepper is intermittent by design. Because the corns are whole and scattered, you eat several mouthfuls of buttery, saffron-scented cheese and then bite into one, and it flares. This is a cheese with a rhythm rather than a constant level of heat.

Aged past six months the texture dries and becomes granular, the sheep's milk concentrates towards nuts and browned butter, and the lamb paste rennet adds a peppery bite of its own, separate from the corns. Young, it is a table cheese anyone will like. Old, it is a serious, slightly difficult cheese that rewards attention.

At two or three months it is a table cheese, and in Sicily that is where it stays: thick slices with semolina bread and green olives, sometimes with a piece of sun-dried tomato underneath. It is also the cheese for the local pane cunzatu, where the heat of a fresh loaf just softens it.

Past six months it turns into a grating cheese and does something no other cheese does: it colours the dish. Grated over pasta with sardines, over macaroni with mutton ragù, over baked vegetables, it leaves a yellow cast along with the flavour.

It does not melt well, as no hard pecorino does, so keep it away from toasties and pizza. Instead shave it over something already hot, where the residual heat releases the saffron without the cheese stringing or splitting.

One local use worth stealing: stirred off the heat into a purée of fava beans or chickpeas. The pepper and the saffron do exactly the job you would otherwise do with added spices, and they do it more elegantly.

Like any hard pecorino, it keeps in the fridge on the least cold shelf, between 6 and 8°C (43 and 46°F), wrapped in greaseproof paper or a lightly dampened cotton cloth. Never film against the paste: the cheese sweats under it and the surface turns slippery.

A half-kilo piece handled that way holds six to eight weeks, and what happens across that time is drying. The cut face dries and darkens, so scrape off a thin veil before serving and the paste behind it is unchanged. Surface bloom on the rind comes off with a cloth dipped in vinegar or white wine.

One detail specific to this cheese: saffron is light sensitive. A piece left in direct light loses colour and aroma within days, which is why producers age in the dark and why the wheels stay covered. Freezing is not the route for a whole piece, since the paste turns grainy, but it works well on cheese already grated, in small portions.

Colour settles most of it. The paste should be evenly yellow, a warm full yellow that runs right up to within a millimetre of the rind. Yellow gathered into veins or blotches means the saffron was mixed in badly or, worse, replaced with a dye.

The peppercorns should be whole and spread across the whole cut face, neither lined up nor clustered. A cheese with ground pepper, or with a few corns in one spot, is a coloured peppered pecorino under a borrowed name. On the rind you should see the basket weave and the denomination mark. Rind colour runs from deep yellow to golden brown on older wheels, and it is not treated with wax or varnish.

Young, the nose leads with sheep milk and follows with saffron, carrying that hay and bitter honey note the spice has; with age the order reverses. In the mouth the pepper is not a constant heat: you meet it grain by grain, each one a small isolated burst. Most people notice on the second bite rather than the first.

Outside Sicily this is a hunt. In the US a few Italian importers list it at roughly 28 to 45 dollars per pound, usually in vacuum-packed wedges. In the UK expect 36 to 52 pounds per kilo from specialist Italian cheesemongers, with irregular availability. In continental Europe, north Italian cheese shops carry it at 34 to 45 euros a kilo.

In Enna province itself it costs 18 to 25 euros a kilo at the dairy, 22 to 30 in a good shop, and 32 to 38 for wheels aged past eight months.

The arithmetic behind the price is not negotiable: total production runs to a few dozen tonnes a year, fewer than ten dairies are certified, sheep's milk yields a fraction of what cow's milk does, and saffron is the most expensive spice on earth.

So treat a cheap yellow pecorino with suspicion. At 12 euros a kilo it is a coloured cheese, not Piacentinu. Look for the DOP mark and the dairy number branded on the rind, the basket weave pattern, and (crucially) whole peppercorns rather than ground pepper.

Upper Enna is the place to start. The shops around the Castello di Lombardia and the cathedral stock several producers and cut to order, usually alongside ricotta infornata and pecorino pepato. Tasting the three together settles what this cheese actually is in about five minutes.

Piazza Armerina, half an hour away, has the Villa Romana del Casale and its mosaics, plus a Saturday market where local dairies bring wheels. Aidone, just beyond, holds the Venus of Morgantina in its archaeological museum. It makes a day that runs from the Neolithic to the Romans to a piece of yellow cheese.

In the countryside around Calascibetta, Villarosa and Valguarnera, several farms run morning dairy visits timed to the milking. A few grow their own saffron and will show you the crocus in flower in late October and early November, which is the best window for a visit.

Palermo and Catania both have historic delis and covered markets that carry it at a fair mark-up. Off the island, order it rather than hoping to stumble on it.