Italia: Day Twelve

This morning we got up at seven so that we could make it to the local cheese production site and watch them produce the cheese. There isn’t much that they do differently between types of cheese, so it was similar to the production we saw previously. Today we saw parmesan regano, specifically, which I don’t even like because it’s a little bit too sharp for me.

Metal canisters allow the cheese to harden to the traditional shape

The cheese then soaks in saltwater

We were able to taste the cheese straight from the vat - it was very soupy

We also tasted some of the aged cheese from the warehouse

We got done with the tour early, so we walked around the town of Novellara for a little bit.We poked around inside one of the grocery stores, but they didn't have anything very interesting to buy, so we joined the rest of the group and got back on the bus. We went to Andrea's for a lecture on balsamic vinegar. The production site has been in his family for generations. He walked us through the buildings and explained how balsamic vinegar is produced. Afterword, the group tasted varying kinds of vinegar that differed by the amount of time they were aged.

Lecture on the production before tasting the vinegar

The vinegar ages on site

It was a full morning packed with lectures, and even though I wasn’t hungry, I was happy to go sit for lunch at a restaurant in town. However, this lunch turned out to be very similar to the dinner we had yesterday where there didn’t seem to actually be a main course, but instead involved a lot of passing of plates. I didn’t particularly like the food, but at least it was less complicated. I was able to gorge on ham and bread while avoiding the melon and desert foods.

We came back to the hotel to nap after we ate. I did my journal entry when I woke up and then it was time to leave and go back to Andrea's house. After everyone had made their purchases from his in-house store, we settled into the dining room and listened to a guy tell us about how you can tell if cheese is correctly produced. He is part of the group that assigns certification labels to cheese products within Italy.

It was really boring and I was starving by the time it was over, so I was glad when the bus picked us up to go to a local restaurant for pumpkin stuffed pasta, rissota, and ham sandwiches with a desert of chocolate cake shaped like salami. It was actually a pretty good meal even though none of it is something I would typically eat.