Who Lives Inside the Wheel?

Our trip to the Parmigiano-Reggiano factory turned into much more of an all-day event than anyone anticipated, but I think it counts as the most interesting day I’ve had in Parma. Our tour of the factory started at 8a.m., because the fresh milk comes in early and must be used immediately with milk from the night before to get the correct mix of good bacteria. Milk from the night before is left in wide vats to separate overnight, then the cream is skimmed off the top before it is mixed with the fresh, whole milk from the morning: this provides the right amount of fat, but also gains all the good bacteria from the fresh milk, without having to skim it off (developed bacteria stay in the cream of the milk, where they can feed on the sugars). Our tour guide (who happens to be the owner), explains it in a much more expressive way, and even employs a couple of our group to help him act out the movements of proteins, fats, and water within the milk. As he says about bacteria, “these three good guy bacterias live in the wheel from the very start- they run around eating, but they never produce gas, so that they don’t make holes in the cheese- but they make it taste delicious!” The rest of our tour is equally interesting, from the room where the cheese is molded and stamped (I now know how to read the markings on a wheel of Parmigiano), to the brining room –“here we give all the wheels a nice salt-water bath for 19 days! It is very good for their skin…”– to the best room of them all: the storage room. We gazed upon over $3 million worth of cheese, stacked in neat rows on shelves that ran the length of the room and went all the way to the ceiling. This was one of two storerooms- the other had all the more expensive, older wheels in it. Most of the wheels we saw were not yet real Parmigiano-Reggiano, because they had not yet been inspected and stamped. After a year of aging, an inspector will come and check every single wheel, carefully hammering on it with a tool similar to a doctor’s reflex hammer, checking for hollow sounds or variations that could mean air bubbles in the cheese, and would keep that wheel from ever getting the official Parmigiano stamp. Any wheels that passed, however, got the official stamp melted into the side of their rind, and would go on to be sold on the market for around $900.
We ended our tour of the factory with a tasting of the 15 month, 24 month, and 36 month old Parm- Each had a distinct flavor and texture, drying and intensifying with every month. The oldest was my favorite, not because of the flavor, but because of the texture, dry and crumbly with tiny pockets of crunchy tyrosine (an amino acid). The flavor is unmistakable as well, of course, but every wheel will end up with different, sometimes unexpected, tastes and aromas mixed in- one 24-month Parmigiano I had definitely tasted like pineapples. Another was more like grass.
Instead of going home after our tour of the factory, the owner brought us down the road a couple kilometers to the farm to meet his dairy cows. This is the beauty of his company, he explains, patting one of the cows on the head: he can control everything. He knows the cows, he knows the milk, he knows the process, he knows everything about the cheese. “This way” he says, placing a hand dramatically over his heart, “I can be sure I am proud of the cheese.” Then he laughs, and says we should come see the baby cow that was just born this morning, and see the new barn that’s being built, and that we should come back that night, because the restaurant that is attached to the factory is also a bar/disco where he will be DJing tonight, and he would love to have so many young people there. He says he will play American music for us, and will go talk Giacomo (our guardian and program director), into keeping the rented bus for the night to bring us. Most of us agree eagerly. …after all, who wouldn’t jump at the chance to say they’d danced the night away at a Parmigiano factory?