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.
