Provolone

Provolone is pasta filata: the curd is cut, left to acidify, then plunged into near-boiling water and stretched until it becomes a glossy, elastic mass that can be shaped, tied with rope and hung. Same technique as mozzarella and caciocavallo, but built to age rather than to be eaten the day it is made.

Provolone Valpadana DOP, protected since 1996 and overseen by a consortium based in Cremona, is the protected name. Production runs across the Po Valley (Cremona, Brescia, Bergamo, Lodi, Piacenza) and into the Veneto around Verona, Vicenza, Padua and Rovigo.

The split between dolce and piccante is decided on day one, at the rennet. Dolce uses liquid calf rennet and stays milky and supple, aged one to three months. Piccante uses rennet paste from kid or lamb, which carries lipase enzymes that break down milk fat into free fatty acids. Those acids are the sharpness. Longer ageing, from three months to well over a year, deepens it, but no amount of ageing will make a calf-rennet cheese taste piccante.

Provolone del Monaco DOP is a separate cheese entirely: from the Lattari mountains above the Amalfi Coast, made largely from Agerolese cow's milk and aged at least six months.

Dolce tastes of warm milk and butter with a faint tang at the end, like a firmer, drier low-moisture mozzarella that has been given time to think. Mild, springy, slightly sweet, salt in the background. It is a good sandwich cheese and an excellent melting cheese, and nothing about it is challenging.

Piccante is a different animal. The first note is still milk, then the lipase flavours arrive: a sharp, peppery, faintly goaty prickle at the back of the throat, closer to a young pecorino or a sharp provola than to cheddar. Well-aged pieces develop crunchy tyrosine crystals and a savoury, almost meaty depth. It is properly salty and should tingle: if it merely tastes strong and salty, it was not made with rennet paste.

Both versions are firm rather than crumbly, and both slice cleanly. Smoked versions exist; the smoke is light and was historically about protecting the rind rather than flavouring the cheese.

Dolce is one of the great melting cheeses. Cut it two centimetres thick and put it on a screaming-hot griddle for three minutes a side: the surface crusts and the inside goes molten. Italian emigration carried this preparation to Argentina, where it acquired its own name, provoleta, and is served with dried oregano and olive oil.

It also does the ordinary work well: sandwiches, gratins, stuffed meat rolls, baked pasta, and the filling of Sicilian rice balls. It browns without going oily.

Piccante is a seasoning as much as a cheese. Grate it over pasta with beans or lentils, shave it over bitter greens, cube it into bread dough. It is genuinely salty, so cut the salt elsewhere in the dish.

Off the heat, serve dolce with pears, grapes or figs, and piccante with chestnut honey or Cremona mostarda, the candied-fruit mustard preserve made a few streets from where the consortium sits. Take either out of the fridge an hour before serving.

A vacuum-sealed piece keeps at 4 to 8 C up to the date printed on the pack, which is the maker's figure. Once it is open, wrap it in waxed or greaseproof paper and put it in a box that is not airtight, in the least cold part of the fridge. Dolce holds its texture for roughly one to two weeks; piccante, drier and saltier to begin with, holds for several weeks. Cling film pressed on the cut face traps moisture and makes it slick within a day or two, so paper first, plastic only around the paper.

What happens over time is drying and fat migration. The cut face pales, hardens and turns slightly translucent, oil beads out if the piece sits warm, and a thin skin forms that can be pared off with a knife. On the rind, dry bloom lifts with a cloth dampened in vinegar. Freezing suits it badly, since the paste crumbles when thawed and no longer slices cleanly; grated piccante keeps six months at minus 18 C with some loss of aroma.

The shape is the first clue, because the Italian cheese is hung in ropes and keeps the marks: a salame cylinder, a pear, a melon or a giant torpedo, with a thin smooth rind, straw to amber, often waxed, and a rope groove near the neck. Cut it and the paste is compact and pale ivory, with a faint layered grain left by the stretching. Look for Provolone Valpadana DOP or Provolone del Monaco DOP on the label, plus the piccante or dolce wording, which reflects the rennet used and not just the age.

Outside Italy the word travels loosely. American deli provolone is a domestic factory cheese sold in flat sandwich rounds, mild and rubbery, with no origin mark, and it is what most counters mean by the name. Smoked versions and pear-shaped caciocavallo, which carries a small head above a tie mark, are separate things again. A DOP wheel imported by the piece costs several times the sliced deli block, and the piccante commands more than the dolce.

In the US, look for 'Provolone Valpadana DOP' on the label rather than the word provolone alone, which is a generic cheese name there. Eataly, Whole Foods cheese counters, DiBruno Bros, Murray's and online importers carry it at 16 to 25 dollars a pound. Ask specifically for piccante, because most counters default to dolce or to domestic provolone.

In the UK, Italian delicatessens and online cheesemongers stock it at 20 to 30 pounds a kilo; Ocado and larger supermarkets carry mild versions. La Latteria, Lina Stores and I Camisa in London are reliable for the aged piccante.

What to check: the consortium mark branded or applied on the rind, the words dolce or piccante, the rope marks in the rind, and a pale straw paste with no widespread holes. Small white crunchy crystals in an aged piece are tyrosine and a good sign, not a fault.

Buy a wedge cut from a whole form rather than a vacuum pack where you can: pre-sliced provolone in a plastic sleeve is almost always the young generic type.

Cremona, the seat of the consortium, is where the local pairing lives: sharp provolone against mostarda, the syrupy mustard-spiked candied fruit the city is known for. It is one of the most successful sweet-and-sharp combinations in northern Italian food.

Dairies across the lower Brescia and Lodi plains sell small whole forms direct, and tasting a dolce and a piccante one after the other is the fastest way to understand what the rennet does.

In the Veneto, osterie in Verona and Vicenza put grilled provolone on the antipasto list, with olive oil and black pepper. And if you go south, the Provolone del Monaco is worth the detour to Agerola and Vico Equense above the Amalfi Coast: a different cheese, named for the dark monk-like cloaks its makers wore crossing the bay by night to reach the Naples market.