Scores of trucks go cattleshed to cattleshed to fill their big belly with this milk, fortune of the nature, produced in abundance by the female cattle: within really short time they deliver it at the dairy.

And now we will see the milk transformation. Among precise, excited, silent gestures of the dairyman and of his staff, who moves with determined pace and light steps, as in a ballet, among vats, thermometers, shovels, strange filters and the fumes that ooze from the boilers… How can’t we be captivated by such enchanting vision?

How can’t we be moved when we see that behind these standardized actions the milk fluidity changes its state, changes its appearance, it contracts and it turns into something else, first curd then cheese? This is merit of many factors combined together and of the use of a substance that allowed already to the first shepherds to transform the milk into cacio, that is, rennet.

Liquid, if we want fresh cheese, or in powder, if the Provolone Valpadana will have to undergo ripening. Today, as in prehistoric age, the rennet is a result of nature that comes from the animals, calves (for the sweet cheese), lambs or kids (for the spicy cheese), and that makes the milk coagulating.

milk delivery

liquid rennet addition

But even before using the rennet, the dairymen add to the milk another important natural element, the grafted whey, that is the whey saved up on the day before (the whey is the liquid that remains in the boiler when the curd is hardened) and left to stand for one day and one night. This substance contains many micro-organisms as precious as gold for the phenomena that it will cause later on in the cheese, but also because this ferments are those that, since they pass from day to day from a cheese to another, they leave it a mark, hidden and intrinsic, but strong, characteristic of the place, of the dairy and of the cattle of the cattlesheds that, right there, destine their milk.

boiler

In the boilers of the dairies of the Provolone Valpadana the curd is cut for a first time, then also during a second phase, by a pole that opens out at the top into a tangle of cutting blades, and then it is “cooked”.

Still, the most characteristic action of the millenary process from which we obtain the Provolone Valpadana is the stretching “filatura”, (in fact we speak about stretched-curd cheese, “formaggio a pasta filata”).

stretching

Some special moulds allow to mould the curd according the form that you want: spherical form, pear form, cylindrical form, salame form, mandarin form,… The salt will give the finishing touch to the future cheese, before it is left to stand in the storehouse for ripening. For the salting the newly-born forms of Provolone Valpadana are let down into big vats for the immersion into water containing marine salt.

Once they are picked up from the brine, the forms are washed with cold water and tided up.

f

salting - brining

The “binding” with the suitable ropes is another special touch of the dairyman for his cheese, in this way showing another ancient tradition, which has never been lost and, as for the other phases of the processing method, is recorded on a document called Production Specifications, that have to be followed to the letter.

cooling - hardening

But it is during the ripening that the spell is completed, with the weather complicity.

It is in right in this phase that within some days or some months, the substances mature in the cheese, the bacteria act, new tastes take origin: Provolone Valpadana P.D.O., sweet or spicy, fresh or mature, is born. Of course, with Protected Designation of Origin, as the European Union recognized it.
 

binding

mandarini storage

pancette storage