Sooner or later I was bound to cover this category of cheese. Your grandma’s favorite…
Part IV: Coagulated
In its native Italian, the word “tiramisù” means “pick me up,” referring to the espresso kick that lies dormant within coffee-soaked ladyfingers, buried beneath whipped mascarpone cheese and cocoa powder. Though the coffee originated from Yemen through tropical Africa, and the cocoa from the jungles of Brazil, the main ingredient—mascarpone cheese—was a product of Northern Italy. Now a staple of every confectionary between Venice and Milan, mascarpone was first brewed by Catholic monks in the fertile hills of Lombardy, the most populous and wealthiest region of Italy.
After the whey is removed, to produce a heavy cream, a smidgen of lemon juice is added to the cheese for denaturation (i.e. the breakdown its proteins) over the course of two nights in a cool, dark room. This was not the original process, however, as mascarpone was created by accident—as most cheeses were—in the late 16th century, because these Lodigiani Catholic monks didn’t wash their barrels before storing their cream cheese. The insides of the barrels were still slick with tartaric acid—the crystalline sour silt found in grapes, procured since time immemorial as a byproduct of winemaking—and the vessel’s wood, long-soaked in this natural acid, curdled their heavy cream into a gently-whipped delight.
Most people believe the cold cake tiramisu to be nearly as old as its main ingredient, mascarpone cheese, but those people would be wrong. Tiramisu is not an Italian tradition “that grandma used to make, back in the old country,” like cannolis or spaghetti. It was neither a tasty rouser for the courtesans of Tuscany’s plump duke, nor the caffeinated treat that kept Italy's first prime minister on his feet. As Jane Black once wrote in the Washington Post, “Even in the 19th century, without refrigeration, a dessert made with uncooked eggs would likely have sickened more people than it pleased.”
The inhabitants of Italy’s most picturesque region, Veneto, owe the tiramisu to confectioner Carminantonio Iannaccone who—on December 24, 1969—baked the delicacy first for Roberto Linguanotto, owner of “Le Beccherie” in Treviso. Linguanotto has since fervently claimed to be the dessert’s inventor—saying he baked it for the restaurant’s original owners as a way to say “y’all can trust me in your kitchen;” he later wrote, “I was persauded to have given birth to a successful cake, and this convinction was confirmed by the high quantity of portions served every day, and especially by the high number of customers that asked for a second serving!”—but the culinary world largely agrees that demure chef Carminantonio Iannaccone was the brain behind the cake.
“It's not a big invention,” he said. “It's not like the telephone. It's just a dessert.” Before he was out of his teens, in 1969, he married his wife and opened a restaurant in Treviso; there, he amalgamated the “everyday flavors of the region”—cocoa powder, dark coffee, mascarpone cream, whipped eggs, and ladyfinger cookies—into “an elegant, freestanding cake.” His “pick-me-up” dessert, “tiramisu,” was an immediate sensation. Chefs around the world began to copy his recipe and, by the early Eighties, tiramisu had become a staple of Italian cuisine — so much so that they now serve it at Olive Garden and call it “traditionary.” “Today, it's a mess,” said Iannaccone, “but if you like it and your grandma made it that way, fine.”
For over three centuries, mascarpone has reigned as the preeminent creamed cheese, and demand for it has never stopped growing. With an ever-increasing production rate, you’d imagine there’s a lot of leftover whey being tossed in the garbage—however, there’s actually a whole industry behind salvaging that which has been lost along the whey.
As early as the Bronze Age, circa 2,000 BC, humans were using ceramic “milk boiling” vessels on the Italian peninsula, turning whole milk into partial cheese. The rennet-coagulation process became dominant by 1,000 BC and the Etruscan elite revered their hard cheeses. (Bronze cheese graters have been found in the graves of Roman aristocrats, as well as in their dig-site kitchens.) The production of hard cheeses in ancient Italy created a lot of whey byproduct, and—unlike today—nothing edible was wasted, akin to the prairie buffalo.
Though it is not in the historical record (because Cato the Elder and Columella were haughty gastronomists) cheese born on the whey-side was just as popular as hard cheeses. As the “sloppy seconds” of the true production process, whey-based cheeses were not desirable by market-goers (a grief also owed to its short shelf life) so these whey-abortions were generally eaten by the families of the cheesemakers. The whey leftover from cow, goat, and sheep milk was coagulated—fermented, overnight, at room temperature—and then reheated in hot water. The high temperature and low acidity denatures the whey, releasing its moisture among the steam. The resultant wet glob compacts into a curd and is strained by cloth before it's ready for consumption. This such process of “reheating whey” became colloquially entwined with the end-product: “ricotta,” meaning “recooked.”
Ricotta derives its white, creamy, and slightly sweet composition from the glut of saturated fat within. (After all, 100% of ricotta is the “soft, extraneous, unhealthy goo” that cheesemakers generally thrown away.) It’s quick to perish, even if refrigerated, meaning—now that cheesemaking largely happens in faraway factories—high-quality ricotta has gone from rags to riches like Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman:” from pauper slop to artisanal bourgeoise spread, with a price fluctuating like snapper at the local fish market.
Its texture is often compared to cottage cheese, but I consider that a disparagement against ricotta—in my sane, educated opinion—to compare such flavorful moist sweetness to the chewy sour milk that is ‘cottage cheese.’ This hasn’t stopped “innovative” housewives from substituting ricotta with cottage cheese in their lasagnas, or substituting mayonnaise with it in tuna salad, or substituting yogurt with it in parfaits, or eating it on toast, or with whole tomatoes, or on its own. Cottage cheese has long-been popular with dieters due to its protein content, making waves every generation since the Seventies as “the” dietary substitute, which was a practice originally forged by the US Government during World War I, when they browbeat the American public into surrendering their meats to the troops on the front lines.
The first usage of the phrase “cottage cheese” was in 1831, referencing the simplistic, homemade quality of the curds, made using whatever milk remained after a rural American family’s attempt at brewing butter. The boiled milk product was drained but not pressed, meaning the curds and whey were left to float around in the mire. This chunky puddle comes in two varieties: washed and unwashed.
Unwashed curds stay small, with a higher acidity, whereas washed curds are sweeter and larger. Washing curds for cottage cheese requires the use of rennet, the stomach enzymes of grazing animals. Rennet’s primary enzyme (chymosin) curdles the casein proteins in milk, speeding along the cheesemaking process and thereby producing a curd with less natural acid. Rennet is harvested from the digestive tracts of grazing animals—typically, baby cows.
The purest rennet comes from the inner mucosa of the fourth stomach of unweaned baby cows, thereby requiring cheesemakers to have strong relationships with the veal industry. Calves bred for the butcher offer their stomachs to cheesemakers, who then dry, clean, and cut the stomachs into tiny pieces. The stomach chunks are salted with wine and whey, and this stomach soup is filtered overnight. One gram of the final concoction is enough to coagulate four liters of milk. (Thank you, baby cows!)
In 1852, Hanne Nielsen of Øverød (north of Copenhagen) brewed her curds with the purest of rennets to create a sustainable semisoft cheese from cow’s milk. This was an independent experiment in curd-washing, rather ahead of its time (as true curd-washing wouldn't come about until 1885 with Wisconsin's Colby cheddar), but if anyone were to prematurely invent an agricultural process it would have been Hanne Nielsen. Her farm, Havarthigaard, was more of a laboratory than a barnyard. After touring Europe to learn the different arts of cheesemaking, Hanne returned to Havarthigaard like a samurai coming home from war and establishing a dojo.
With fresh rennet and pristine milk, Hanne churned-out barrel-loads of cheese, mastering her own technique: washing the curds with water from an underground spring, pressing them into square molds, and draining them of moisture. The resulting soft, subtle, creamy flavor had a depth of sweet buttery flavor and yet a range wide enough to introduce sharpness, with a tinge of acidity. The perfect aging was deemed three months, in a cold, dark room, though any longer didn't sour the cheese; rather, it gained a saltiness, tasting almost like hazelnuts.
At room temperature, this new cheese softened greatly, allowing it to be easily served, sliced, melted, and shared. Frankly, it was the perfect cheese for the dinner table, and the world needed to know.
She named the cheese for her farm, Havarthigaard, calling it “Havarti.” In order to reap the praise her cheese deserved, she sent a free block of Havarti to the royal family of Denmark — and they loved it, purchasing a block a week from her shop in Copenhagen. The public caught the trend. By 1920, Havarti was a national staple in Danish cuisine.
Around the same time Hanne Nielsen was crafting Havarti, Anders Larsen Bakke of Norway was cutting cheese in the village of Våle, a day's walk south of Oslo, in what was once the county of Jarlsberg. His cavernous, sturdy cheese was an offshoot of Emmental, which the Swiss had brought to Oslo in the 1830s. The annual report of Jarlsberg's agricultural output first made record of Anders Larsen Bakke's new ‘mild cheese’ in 1855, and from then on it retained the name of its homeland — “Jarlsberg.”
While the Danes and Norse had their cheese pioneers, nothing compares to the majesty of artisanal cheesemaking in Bjurholm, Sweden. There, you'll find Christer & Ulla Johansson and Älgens Hus, the “Elk House.” Theirs is the world's first and only dairy farm to produce cheese from moose milk. The Johanssons own three very fertile moose who are hand-pumped regularly, yielding over 300kg of “moose cheese” a year.
Don't tell me you don't want to know what moose cheese tastes like. We know you want to know, because everybody wants to know — and that's why it's a delicacy: because you can't have it. One kilogram of moose cheese sells for a thousand dollars. That's right: $455 for a single pound of hearty moose cheese.
Talk about a great market opportunity…
Hey — anybody want to milk moose with me?