C H E E S E   A N T H O L O G Y

Ragusano

By Edward Behr

appellation: Denominazione di Origine Protetta (DOP)

place: the Province of Ragusa and most of the adjoining Province of Siracusa, Sicily, Italy

milk: cow (traditionally, Modicana), raw

type: large, pasta filata, hard, aged

size: large rectangles, weighing from 10 to 16 kilos (about 22 to 35 pounds)

production: 14 farms (11 of which use only their own milk), five stagionature (aging centers); total annual production from 145 to 190 metric tonnes each year

related cheeses: Caciocavallo Siciliano, Caciocavallo Palermitano (also known as Caciocavallo di Godrano), Cosacavaddu Ibleo, all Sicilian and rectangular, as well as the globular versions of caciocavallo in Sicily and other regions of southern Italy

look for: “Ragusano da vacca modicana,” meaning made from the milk of the traditional Modicana cows; cheese from mild three-month-old through gratable, according to your purpose; cheese made during the prime months of February, March, and April (the date of production is stamped on each cheese) — Ragusano is variable, so ask for a taste

taste: round, appealing, and moderately savory at its best, becoming stronger and even peppery with age

drinks: With a four-to-six-month-old cheese, Giuseppe Licitra, the great specialist in Ragusano, prefers the red wine Cerasuolo di Vittoria (the area’s blend of Nero d’Avola with Frappato), and, with an older cheese, pure Nero d’Avola (Sicily’s leading red variety, which excels around Ragusa).

 

Ragusano, outwardly, is one of the oddest cheeses, a rectangle that weighs an average 15 kilos (33 pounds), its neat shape being undone in the middle by the rope from which it hangs in aging. That leaves it slightly distended, as if from an overtight belt. Ragusano comes from Sicily’s primary dairy area, centered on the Baroque towns of Ragusa and Modica in the southeast of the island, and running from the coast up into the Iblean Mountains. Composed of limestone, they rise gently through hills to not quite 1,000 meters. The soil of the area is predominantly lime and clay. The buildings of the traditional farms, called masserie, are constructed of limestone, and the pastures are divided by dry limestone walls. As recently as 1987, some 600 farms made Ragusano, but now just 14 make the cheese, as few as two to six cheeses per day. (In North America, Ragusano is scarce; variable quality has discouraged some sellers who tried in the past. With the reduced number of makers, the average level may have risen.) All the roughly 11,000 cheeses each year are made by hand. Ragusano is a pasta filata (stretched-curd) cheese, and the acidity and heat required to stretch the curd also discourage or kill spoilage organisms and shrink and dry the curd, all of which help to protect it. Especially during the warmest months of cheesemaking, that’s important.

Until 1955, when Ragusano was among the first group of Italian cheeses to be recognized with a denominazione di origine, the cheese was called cosacavaddu rausanu, in Sicilian, or caciocavallo ragusano, in Italian, a name now applied to much lesser non-DOP cheese. Southern Italy’s caciocavalli, a dozen or more kinds depending upon your count, are all pasta-filata and flask-shaped, except that as soon as Ragusano and a few others in Sicily are formed, the warm globe is squared off.

The name caciocavallo smashes together the Italian for “cheese” and “horse.” The meaning, it’s commonly explained, is “cheese on horseback” (cacio a cavallo). In older forms of caciocavallo, the sphere of curd is drawn toward one end, creating a neck and head, ready to have a cord tied for suspending the cheeses in pairs from a wooden support, as if straddling a horse. Round or square, all caciocavalli are hung in pairs. But there’s no particular evidence to support the horseback etymology or even to show an Italian origin for the cheese. In the 1st century CE, the Roman agriculturist Columella described a cheese that seems to have been pasta filata, but caciocavallo might have been made long before that in Greece or farther east.

The homophonic cheese kashkaval, generally considered to form a family with Italian caciocavallo, is found in a number of largely warm countries, from southern Italy through the former Yugoslavia to the Crimea, Turkey, the Caucasus, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and Hungary, and across North Africa. According to the title of a 2014 article, one of a three-part series by Altin Raxhimi published on the website Balkan Insight: “What We Call Kashkaval Is Just a Mess.” The articles are probing, amusing, and open-minded, albeit from an Albanian perspective, exploring what kashkaval is and where it might come from. Kashkaval isn’t necessarily (or perhaps not usually) pasta filata; often the curd is pressed flat into a wheel shape; and the milk is often sheep or goat. One possible origin of the name is kasher, an old word for kosher. Jews were among the more mobile peoples who might have spread cheesemaking methods (but which ones?).

In contrast, Italy’s caciocavallo is well-defined. It’s made of cow’s-milk (rarely, Calabria’s Caciocavallo di Ciminà contains some goat); the curd is high in acidity and is heated, which together make it plastic; it’s stretched by hand and shaped in a globe; it’s unpressed, brined, occasionally smoked, and eaten anywhere from new and soft to mature and firm. It’s dense, with only a few tiny holes or none.

For Ragusano, the cows that produce the milk eat mainly pasture. Giuseppe Licitra of the University of Catania started the regional dairy group, the Consorzio Ricerca Filiera Lattiero Caseria, in 1990 and has been responsible for numerous studies of aspects of Ragusano. One of Licitra’s studies examined the area’s pasture, where in contrast with wetter climates grasses have minor importance. Fourteen plants dominated the cows’ diet: field chamomile, field marigold, a kind of honeywort (Cerinthe major), wild beet, white rocket, wild mustard, sun spurge, burclover (Medicago polymorpha), a form of scorpion’s tail (Scorpiurus minimus), whitestem filaree, wild geranium (Geranium sibiricum), common mallow, drug fumitory, and red dock.

Annual production of Ragusano fluctuates widely, partly because rainfall does and therefore the amount of forage and milk for cheese. During June, July, and August, there’s no fresh forage at all, and the weather is too warm for good cheesemaking. An official announcement is made of the date when Ragusano production must end in late spring, for lack of pasture, and when it can start again in September or October.

Almost all the milk for Ragusano used to come from the area’s dark, almost winy-red Modicana cows, noted for their resistance to disease, their ability to make good use of the forage from the dry, warm climate, and their ability to calve well in that environment; formerly, they were also draft animals. In the 1980s, the area’s farmers began to turn to non-native breeds with much higher yields of milk: Brown Swiss, Pezzata Rossa, Holstein, and their crosses, including with Modicana. When I visited in 2003, just 700 Modicana cattle were left — cows, bulls, and calves combined. Modicana milk is high in protein and in kappa-casein BB, both of which increase the yield of cheese, and Modicana cheese commands a slightly higher price, but overall it’s less profitable. Today the population has risen a little to about 1,000, and three farms make Ragusano da vacca modicana, solely from Modicana milk, about 10 percent of the total.

During the season, the farmers make Ragusano each morning or, on a few traditional masserie, twice a day, and they make ricotta from the whey. (Both men and women traditionally made Ragusano; only women made the ricotta.) The first careful survey of Ragusano methods, by Licitra and others working under the regional consortium, took place during the 1992 to 1993 cheesemaking season, when cheesemaking was examined on 20 farms chosen for the quality of their cheese.

The first step in making nearly all the world’s cheese today is to add a laboratory-selected, normally commercial starter, but the rules for Ragusano require that it be made without one. The needed acidifying bacteria instead come from the wooden tina, the vat, whose surface “biofilm” is a reservoir of diverse useful microflora. (The same is true, for instance, of traditionally made Caciocavallo Palermitano and Vastedda della Valle del Belice; outside Italy, the salient example of a cheese whose flora come from a similar biofilm is Salers in France.) To the warm, raw milk in the tina, the farmers add lamb or kid rennet, and in 60 to 80 minutes the curd has set.

The maker stirs and breaks it with the wooden rotula to make pieces “the dimensions of a lentil” (per the disciplinare), then adds enough very hot water (about 80 degrees C, or 175 degrees F) to raise the temperature of the curds and whey to about 40 degrees C (104 degrees F) — this is the first “cooking.” After a pause, the pieces are further reduced to the size of “a grain of rice.”

The curd settles, and the whey is drawn off to be made into ricotta. Then some of the hot scotta (the liquid left from ricotta-making) is poured back over the curd, which is left for around 85 minutes while its temperature rises to about 40 to 45 degrees C (104 to 113 degrees F). This hotter second “cooking” has a partly pasteurizing effect, as it selects more heat-tolerant microflora. Aromatically, by nature, pasta filata are quieter cheeses. The curd is then put to ferment on the mastredda (the “constrictor”), a wooden table with several compartments for cheeses. Over the next 16 to 24 hours, according to the ambient temperature (in cold weather, the curd is covered with a woolen blanket), the cheese’s acidity increases to the required point.

When the pH is right, the curd is sliced thin with a knife. The slices go into the wooden or tinned-copper staccio, smaller than the tina, along with enough hot water to raise the curd to about 50 degrees C (122 degrees F). That with the curd’s acidity creates the plastic texture. Slowly, the maker melds and stretches the curd, with one hand directly on it and the other on the long, flat wooden manuvedda. Then two hands together slowly, steadily draw the smooth-surfaced, egg-shaped mass closed in a sort of mouth, making certain no air is trapped inside, just the way smaller caciocavalli are formed. The surface of the cheese feels like soft skin.

The new Ragusano, warm and pliable, is placed in a compartment of the mastredda, whose boards lightly press the sides of the cheese, not to expel moisture but to give the rectangular shape. The cheese is rotated several times to square it on all sides, and is left to cool and firm for 12 to 18 hours. It goes into brine on the farm. Two of the farms do all their own aging, but generally the main brining and aging take place at one of five separate stagionature. The three oldest have mountain caves with natural temperatures between 14 and 16 degrees C (57 to 61 degrees C) and 80 to 90 percent humidity.

I had heard that the rectilinear shape originated in the need for compact loading on ships, but when I asked Licitra, he offered a different reason: “to allow the shapes to breathe.” Other kinds of cheese require the labor of regular turning, but the Ragusano cheeses, hanging over the wooden bean, “arranging themselves obliquely and in fact separated from each other, benefit from the movement of air without anyone touching them.”

The paired cheeses are suspended among a forest of others for a minimum of three months. At four to six months, the cheeses are considered semistagionato”; after that, they’re “stagionato.” The longer-aged cheeses, to keep their rinds elastic and avoid cracks, are sometimes rubbed with olive oil, and at the end of aging they’re commonly rubbed and cleaned with oil so they present an amber shine. After a year, they’re firm and used for grating.●

Print Friendly, PDF & Email