Vastedda del Belice

Vastedda della Valle del Belìce DOP is a fresh raw sheep's milk cheese from the Belice valley in western Sicily, across the provinces of Trapani, Agrigento and Palermo. It was protected in 2010, and it is a genuine technical outlier: everywhere else in the world, pasta filata (mozzarella, provola, caciocavallo, scamorza) is made from cow's or buffalo milk. This one is made from sheep's milk, and nobody else does it commercially.

The shape is a squashed disc, 15 to 17 centimetres across and 3 to 4 thick, weighing 500 to 800 grams. The surface is smooth, white and faintly glossy. There is no rind.

The milk comes from Valle del Belice sheep, a local dairy breed developed in this valley from Pinzirita, Comisana and Sarda stock. The rennet is lamb paste, as in all Sicilian cheesemaking.

There is no aged version and there never will be. Vastedda is eaten fresh, within days of production, which is exactly why it is almost impossible to find outside Sicily: it cannot survive a long journey, a warehouse and a shelf.

Imagine mozzarella made by someone who wanted it to taste of something. The texture is the same family (elastic, layered, tearing into sheets rather than crumbling), but the flavour is sheep's milk: sweeter, fattier, with a soft lanolin warmth and a grassy note that cow's milk simply does not carry.

It is mild but not blank. There is a clean lactic tang at the finish, a measured saltiness from a short brine, and a richness on the palate that comes from sheep's milk having roughly twice the fat of cow's milk. It coats the mouth in a way mozzarella does not.

Eaten at room temperature it is at its best. Straight from the fridge the paste tightens and most of the aroma stays locked in. And it changes fast: a Vastedda on day one is sweet and milky, on day four it is noticeably more acidic and more interesting, and by day six it has gone.

Eat it raw, at room temperature, and keep the plate short: extra virgin olive oil from Valle del Belice DOP (the Nocellara cultivar, from the same fields), black pepper and durum wheat bread. The green Castelvetrano olives that come off those same trees are the local accompaniment and the obvious one.

It works with tomatoes the way mozzarella does but with more to say, and it takes fruit well: peaches, figs, melon. With fresh broad beans and oil it is a whole lunch.

Heat it carefully. A short spell in the oven on a focaccia or inside a sfincione is fine, but sustained heat makes it release fat and split, because sheep's milk is far richer than cow's. Add it in the last few minutes rather than at the start.

In Castelvetrano you also see it crumbed and fried in slices, or thrown onto a grill for a few seconds a side, where it behaves like a much finer halloumi. Both work better with a Vastedda that is a day or two old and slightly drier.

This is a fresh cheese with days rather than weeks in it, and the date on the pack is the whole answer. In Sicily it is eaten within two or three days of being made; abroad, after a flight, the window is shorter still. Keep it in the fridge in its own liquid or in the sealed pack it came in, and take it out an hour before serving, because cold makes a sheep milk paste tight and mute. If it has left its liquid, a closed box with a splash of lightly salted water slows the drying.

The changes come fast. The surface loses its gloss and firms into a skin, the disc tightens and gives up whey, acidity rises so the flavour sharpens, and the fat, which is high in sheep milk, starts to read heavier. Sicilian cooks put that to work: a Vastedda a day or two old, slightly drier, is the one they crumb and fry or throw on a grill, because it holds its shape. Freezing is not an option here, since ice crystals cut the stretched curd and it thaws grainy and watery.

The shape is a small flat disc like a focaccia, fifteen to seventeen centimetres across and three or four thick, weighing half a kilo to seven hundred grams, with no rind at all and a smooth ivory white skin that looks slightly wet. It is a stretched curd cheese made from sheep milk, which is unique in Italy, so a slice pulls apart in soft layers rather than crumbling, and it tastes lactic and gently sour with a sheep note behind it. Fresh ones weep a little whey.

Two name clashes catch people out. In Palermo, vastedda is a bread roll, the one filled with spleen in pani ca meusa, and it has nothing to do with the cheese. And a fresh sheep cheese labelled primosale or tuma is not this either: those are simple curd cheeses, granular and crumbly, never stretched. The DOP label reads Vastedda della Valle del Belìce with the consortium mark. Outside Italy it is a rare import with a short life, so it arrives by air at specialist shops, priced around $30 to $45 a pound when it appears at all.

Honestly: in Sicily, or not at all. In the valley itself a whole disc costs 8 to 16 euros, which works out at 14 to 20 euros a kilo: one of the most affordable DOP cheeses on the island, which fits its status as everyday food.

Elsewhere in Italy it appears in good cheese shops at 28 to 40 euros a kilo, often with only a few days of life left. In the US it essentially does not exist: a fresh raw sheep's milk cheese cannot clear the import rules. In the UK a handful of specialist cheesemongers will order it in at roughly 40 to 55 pounds a kilo, usually on request rather than from stock.

Total production is a few dozen tonnes a year from a small number of certified dairies in a handful of towns. It was a Slow Food Presidium before it became a DOP, and without that protection it would probably have disappeared.

If you do order it online, only do so with refrigerated 24-hour shipping, and ask for the production date rather than the sell-by date. On this cheese, the two are not close together.

Castelvetrano is the natural base: dairies, the town's dark Timilia bread, the green olives, and Selinunte a few kilometres away, where the Greek temples face the sea. The Thursday market is where producers bring the morning's discs.

Menfi, Santa Margherita di Belice, Partanna and Sambuca di Sicilia all have working farms that process their own sheep's milk and take visitors. Several stretch the curd first thing in the morning, and it is worth seeing: sheep's milk curd stretching in boiling water looks like something that should not work.

Gibellina is worth the detour for the Cretto di Burri, the vast sheet of white concrete poured over the ruins of the town destroyed by the 1968 earthquake (the largest land-art work in Italy) and for the contemporary art museum in the rebuilt town. Santa Margherita di Belice has the Filangeri di Cutò palace of Il Gattopardo, now a museum.

Palermo, Trapani and Agrigento all sell it in their historic markets. Ask what day it was made; here the date matters more than the label.