True Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese comes from northern Italy, where a handful of master cheesemakers devote themselves to creating this most celebrated of Italian cheeses. If you can't find the real thing or it's too expensive, you have some good alternatives to grate over your dish of pasta.
Parmigiano-Reggiano
Marcella Hazan, the renowned cookbook author and authority on Italian cooking, says that the word "Parmesan" refers to grating cheese, most commonly used on pasta dishes. The undisputed king of Italian grating cheeses is Parmigiano-Reggiano, a cow's milk cheese produced in a very small area in the provinces of Parma and Reggio Emilio. Its makers age the cheese in wheels for 18 months before selling it.
Because making it is labor intensive, true Parmigiano-Reggiano is relatively scarce and thus not always easy to find, and when you do locate it, you may be surprised at how expensive it is. Just about the worst thing you can do to a good dish of pasta, however, is to top it off with the so-called Parmesan cheese available pregrated in little glass jars. Before you stoop to that, consider some of these more attractive, and infinitely more palatable, choices.
Pecorina Romano
In her highly personal and evocative cookbook "Marcella Cucina," Hazan lists three other hard Italian cheeses suitable for grating. Pecorina Romano is a sheep's milk cheese that has a sharper taste than any other Italian grating cheese. Sardinia produces most of the pecorina Romano sold in the United States, but Hazan contends that the best examples come from the countryside surrounding Rome.
Grana Padano
Grana Padano is a cow's milk cheese produced in a huge area that encompasses 27 provinces in northern Italy. The cheesemakers age it for 12 months before cutting it from the wheels and selling it.
Fiore Sardo
Fiore Sardo is a hard sheep's milk cheese made in Sardinia that, like Romano, ages for a year, but because of differences in the way the makers process the milk, it is less sharp than Romano.
Non-Italian Grating Cheeses
Besides these cheeses, James Beard, the late, great dean of American cooking, listed several others in his delightful book "Beard on Pasta." Among those produced outside Italy are aged gouda, made in the Netherlands of cow's milk; sapsago, a Swiss-made green cheese; aged Monterey jack, from Monterey County, California; and Kashkaval, a grating cheese from the Eastern Mediterranean and Balkan states.
Tags: milk cheese, grating cheese, cheese produced, dish pasta, Fiore Sardo