EMILIA-ROMAGNA
Hands clasped firmly behind his back, with the beady vigilance of a parade-ground sergeant major, Alessandro Ferrarini strides among his massed ranks of cheese.
Several thousand recruits are lined up. Evenly spaced and immaculately presented, they stand on rows of shelves reaching almost to the ceiling. Alessandro — the fleece beneath his waxy,
army-green lab coat zipped up to the neck against the carefully calibrated cold — is here to sniff out imperfection. He spots a suspect, wrestles it expertly down from the shelf onto a wooden stool and sets about it with a hammer. A very small hammer. “You’re listening for a higher pitch,” he says,
tapping delicately at the base of the 45kg wheel and squinting as he gauges the reverberations. “That would betray a crack, a void. Weakness.” The penalty? “Downgraded. It won’t make selection. Standards are very, very high.” It’s a Darwinian existence, the world of
parmigiano reggiano, but it didn’t start out that way. Eight centuries ago, when Benedictine monks first began ageing wheels of cow’s milk in a fertile, sun-drenched river valley a couple of dozen miles east of here, it was simply a tentative experiment in food preservation. But so sought-after proved their salty, granular and unusually versatile creation, that every stage of this monastic alchemy would ultimately find itself wrapped in a stringent cloak of regulation. The production technique — which I’ve just
witnessed in a series of adjacent rooms here at Hosteria Bertinelli, a cheese producer, deli and restaurant west of Parma in northern Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region — remains markedly unchanged since parmigiano reggiano’s inception: the separation of cheese curds from whey in vast copper vats; the shaping in moulds; the month-long immersion in salt baths, in which the fleshy wheels glow beneath the briny surface like alien creatures in a dystopian fantasy. Finally, the ageing in a room such as this:
a turophile temple where the cheese matures for a minimum of 12 months, and anything up to three years — when it takes on a nutty,
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crumbly, almost honeycombed quality with which I’m to develop an unhealthy fixation. Alessandro is not quite il casaro or ‘master’
— the big cheese, if you will. But the 54-year- old is a vital cog in the production of these parmigiano reggiano wheels, and it’s one he manifestly loves. “I never tire of it,” he says. “It’s probably not good for the cholesterol, but hey.” He gives a happy shrug of indifference. Just a few hundred producers in the region
are entrusted with the creation of this globally revered product. Surely there must be rivalry, I ask. Alessandro looks contemplative. “I’d describe it as more of a collective,” he says. “To keep these traditions alive — that’s in all of our interests.” It’s a sentiment I’m to hear repeatedly
during the course of my two-wheeled meander across central Emilia-Romagna. Ernest Hemingway once said that “it is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, because you have to sweat up the hills and freewheel down them”. He clearly never saddled up on a hybrid bike with a handlebar basket and pootled through the unerringly flat landscape of Italy’s ‘food valley’. Cycling in these parts is less about contours than rhythms and flavours. No one’s wearing Lycra or pushing out watts; this is effortless pedalling, punctuated by protracted lunches, indulgent pasticceria (pastry shop) pit stops and picnics on the stoops of semi-derelict farmhouses pondering sweeping life changes. The mighty Po river, which marks the
northern border of much of Emilia-Romagna, was once known for being a shapeshifter; you never really knew what course it was going to take. And it’s in that spirit that a cycle trip here should be undertaken — following word of mouth as much as maps over the course of the week, with luggage ferried on each day to your chosen base to free up pannier space for gastronomic impulse buys. And there’ll be plenty; nowhere in the
world has a higher density of PDO (Protected
Clockwise from top: Espresso and torta di riso (rice cake) at Panificio Melli; Modena’s town centre with the Chiesa del Voto in the background; a dinner of tortelli at Bistrot Canossa, which is good fuel for cyclists spending the night in Reggio Emilia; testing cheese quality at Hosteria Bertinelli, west of Parma. Previous pages from left: Cyclists in the Piazza dei Martiri in Carpi, a town just north of Modena; shelves loaded with prosciutto, olives and bottles of olive oil at Salumeria Hosteria Giusti
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