strambinha strambloga

Diretamente do Il Forno, um artigo que me deixou com água na boca: Southern Italian cheeses, part II: Ragusano, the king of Sicilian cheese.

(…) You don’t often hear about Southern Italian cheese when the best Italian cheeses are named. It’s almost always the Parmigiano Reggiano, Gorgonzola, Taleggio triad. What a lack of fantasy! It’s a pity that these are the only cheeses mentioned, because Italy has more than 400 to choose from and many are at least as delicious and at times breathtaking as these three. Southern Italian cheeses suffer from another problem. They’re clearly “something different”, coming from a unique gastronomic background, much unlike Northern Italian cheese which often share characteristics with their alpine relatives, be they French, Swiss or Austrian. And different is good in my book, as long as it ain’t weird.

Ragusano is a cow’s raw milk cheese hailing from the Iblean plateau and the nearby city of Ragusa (doh!) in Sicily: it has been called the king of the island cheese by many Italian cheese experts, and while I haven’t tasted all of the island’s cheeses I do agree it is a great, imposing and important example of the craft. (…)