Our destination!
Forty-kilo wheels of cheese, awaiting shipment. (Forty kilos is about 88.2 pounds.)
More wheels, awaiting cutting and packaging. Antica Formaggeria sells grated cheese as well as whole wheels and wedges of various sizes.
This machine cuts round slices.
First, the rind is cut through, all the way around. You can see that the wheel of cheese is spinning, because you can't see the "Parmigiano Reggiano" printed on the side........
This is hard to see, but there's a wire on the two round things, which is being pulled through the cheese at the level of the cut in the rind.
The slices are cut into wedges, and the wedges are put into packaging.
The labels of the company which will sell the cheese to the end customer are put on the packages as they are sealed.
They are put in boxes, ready for shipment.
This is "the small room" where cheese is waiting to be ready to sell. There are two bigger rooms at another site. This company has 800,000 wheels in process at any given time. "Eight hundreds of thousands"!!!
That's a LOT of cheese.
The cheese ages for varying lengths of time. Each wheel is tested (and tasted), so experts can decide when that particular wheel will be at its peak of flavor. Some will be at their best in 12 months, or 18 months. Some are at their best at 24 months. It is rare to let them age beyond that, but occasionally there is a wheel that is aged longer.
Europeans are very serious about regional foods. They keep track of *everything* about the foods that must come from one region, and must be produced in one way. Each individual wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano is marked in a way that allows them to keep track of which farm the milk came from, and what day the cows were milked.
Inspectors from the European consortium examine each wheel, to make sure it is up to the requirements for Parmigiano Reggiano. When a wheel passes inspection, it is branded with a branding iron.
They opened a wheel, just for us!
This is the company's cheese expert, tapping the cheese with a hammer to make sure it is solid -- no air holes.
This wheel was made on March 11, 2011.
Cutting one of these by hand is non-trivial. It takes a lot of practice to do it neatly.
He cut the rind, all the way around.
He broke it in half, after cutting the rind.
And there it is -- two perfect halves.
There are no pics of us tasting this.
It was delicious. Creamier than other cheeses that call themselves Parmigiano, and not salty. Mmmmmmm.
They kept urging us to eat more, but we were going to lunch, so we tried to be sensible about how much we ate............. It was really good. Really, really good.
In order to facilitate chronological traversal of these posts, here is a link to the next post.
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