Slow Food is dedicated to the concept of "good,fair, and clean" food, and our Taste Workshop at the organizations's headquarters in Bra served as an excellent illustration of the concept. Slow Food conducts Taste Workshops through their consortia all over the world, believing that the promotion of taste education is the best way to preserve artisan and unique foods. Slow Food's taste workshops were an unusual idea at the time of their inception in the early 90's. At that time, formal tastings of products like artisan cheeses and meats were not done on a regular basis. Thanks in part to Slow Food, tasting like these are now commonplace the world over.
For our taste workshop, we sampled cheeses, cured meats, bread, and ice cream, with a focus on products local to Bra and the surrounding area.
The three cheeses we tried hailed from presidia in the Italian Piedmont.
This cheese is Robiola di Roccaverano, Italy's only characteristic goat cheese. It is produced with 100% raw goat's milk. The producer of this cheese, Arbiora, makes it in the area south of Asti, southeast from Bra. The cheese and knowledge of its production were disappearing at the beginning of the 80's. Producers were starting to make the cheese with sheep and cow's milk instead of the traditional goat. Goats produce less milk then sheep and cows and are thus less economically viable. Slow Food selected three goat herders to support, creating one of the first Presidia. Roccaverano cheese is a Slow Food success story: it is now extremely popular in Italy.
The cheese requires a month of "seasoning", so that the raw goat's milk may coagulate. The only ingredients in the cheese are milk, rennet, and salt. It is eaten rather fresh: Robiola di Roccaverano can be eaten at 10 days, to ensure the full formation of the rind. Flavor-wise, the cheese has an intense, earthy favor, which would doubtless enchant any goat-cheese fan.
The Robiola di Roccaverano was paired with Roero Arneis, a classic Piemonte white wine. The bottle we sampled was produced by Pradlupo in 2006, with Fontanta Fredda as the producer. It was delightfully crisp with a complex flavor: a great, white-fruit flavored wine for a fresh goat cheese.
The next cheese was a Montebore, a semi-firm cheese composed of 70% raw cow milk and 30% raw sheep milk. Montebore was almost lost. No one made it anymore, except for one old lady in the province of Alessandria. A young cheese producer nearby remembered eating it as a child. He was taught how to make it by the remaining old woman, thereby bringing a "disappearing cheese" back from the brink. The sheep milk gives the cheese more fat then the milk of a goat or a cow. The cheese we sampled was quite young, and the taste was undeveloped. It was quite "neat", but not very complex.
This cheese is traditionally paired with a light red wine such as a Barbera. We stuck with the white for now.
The last cheese was the Castelmagno d' Alpeggio, a strong cheese and one of Italy's most classic varieties. It is a form of blue cheese, and has a unique and crumbly texture. It is a Presidio cheese under Slow Food's strictures, and a protected product through the European Union. Considerable confusions exists around Castelmagno d' Alepggio, as large dairies recently began to make it. The true cheese, however, is only produced in the mountains, only in summer, and only from pastured animals. Slow Food selected one producer doing it the old, less-profitable way, and gave the authentic cheese a Presidio brand.
The cheese is produced from two different curds, which are cooked twice. They are then placed in a cave to season. The cheese we sampled was fresh and rather fatty, with a hint of Alpine herbs and flowers. It retained a slightly bitter taste from the rennet.
During the production of Castelmagno d' Alpeggio, it is pierced to allow in the air, to create an interior mold. As the cheese ages, it becomes increasingly dusty. Fatty and milky cheeses like Castelmagno are best with a red wine. One rule to keep in mind: the older the cheese, the sweeter and fresher is the red needed.
We sampled a red wine with this cheese, a Dolcetto d' Albo produced by Cavallotto. The producer is very traditional, and so this wine. The label indicates the cru, or the vineyard of origin. It had a good throaty taste and was excellent when taken to complement the cheeses.
The next component of the taste workshop focused on cured meats. Using the magic of Photoshop, I've labeled the meats we sampled.
We first discussed the concept behind the tasting cured meats. The famous Prosciutto San Daniele is produced with "white meat". It is not made from a "walking pig": the animals are kept in a stable.
The Iberico, or "black" pig of Spain, meanwhile, is allowed a pleasant free range existence. It is encouraged to feast on chestnuts and other woodland foods, until it is slaughtered - the Spansh believes this lends the meat an earthy and powerful flavor. When tasting cured meats, it is de-rigeur to use your hands. Utensils are mere extraneous distractions.
There are two ways to dry meat: industrial and natural. It is not hard to figure out which method Slow Food prefers. A naturally aged meat should be the same color in the middle and on the edges. The dominant taste in a cured meat will be in the fat. When assessing products like prosciutto or iberico, it is best to sample the white fatty part and the colored part separately.
This is Salame di Felino, a meat product local to Bra. We discussed how to grade a good salami before we were permitted to eat it. Here are some guidelines:
You should smell the salami to gauge its freshness. Malodors or a stale scent are not desirable. Next, you should fold the salami in half and eat the center first. This will also help you to assess the freshness of the product. A poorly aged salami will taste vinegary in the middle. You do not want to find any hard bits, which will indicate more miscellaneous meat parts in the salami then anyone likes to know about. You should also look at the casing: a good salami's casing will not be pure white. A pure white casing indicates the addition of wheat flour instead of natural mold. Finally, a good salami, when pulled, shouldn't separate, and the spices in the meat should be evident when smelled. You should pull the skin or casing off salami before cutting it for best flavor.
Next to come was the prosciutto di San Daniele. Our instructor defined ham as simply "fat, salt, and time," which I thought was rather apt. He emphasized that, when assessing cured meats, you should strive to observe how many veins of fat the product has. This is because all the flavor is in the fat. You should, in most elemental terms, be able to "smell the beast" in the product. The prosciutto we sampled was fairly young and had a relatively simple taste, as well as a mouth-feel that was in no way greasy. This was due to the quality of the product: only cheap meat leaves a greasy, unpleasant flavor in the mouth. Our instructor then told us that the taste of ham is determined by three factors: the variety of pig, the diet the pig enjoyed prior to its ineveitable end point, and the aging process.
Finally, we tried the justifiably famous Iberico ham, one of Spain's most iconic products. Iberico is an "open air" ham. 200 pigs are kept on 50 hectares of land, producing something akin to a "wild" pig. The free-range porkers feed on wild nuts during their apparently happy lives, and the earthy flavor of their all natural diet produces the distinctive flavor of Iberico ham. Iberico is aged longer then prosciutto - 24 to 30 months - and this gives its flavor more complexity and a less "fresh" smell. Iberico ham is darker in color then prosciutto and, as the pigs are smaller (all that exercise) derives from a smaller "leg". Its slightly spicy taste comes from oleic acid production. Oleic acid is present in Iberico ham in large amounts, due to its long aging process.
The remains of the meats we sampled.
Here was the bread we were served. This was an excellent chewy, rustic bread, and went perfectly with the local and fresh cheeses and meats we sampled. The bread is prepared with natural yeast in a wood oven, giving it a back-to-basics flavor.
We ended the tasting with some tangerine gelato, produced specifically for Slow Food. It was incredibly good, the sort of stuff that might make one repudiate all other frozen treats forever. The flavor was extremely clear, potent, and fresh. It is a shame we cannot buy huge tubs of this for our freezer.
We very much enjoyed the Taste Workshop. It is evident why these events are so useful for furthering Slow Food's mission. If we are to work to protect something, we must first understand it. Many modern people have not been exposed to good, real food, and have no idea how to assess the quality of such when they come across it. Slow Food's Taste Workshop's fill that gap beautifully. They are held all over the world. Try to attend one near you!
No comments:
Post a Comment