Good Things I've Eaten: Emilia-Romanga

People tend to regard Emilia-Romanga as the heart of Italian cuisine. It is hard to say if this is true or not, as the regional food of Italy is too varied for any one place to be the "heart" of it all. That said, the food here feels important and essential. The dishes are familiar, but edifying. Nothing needs an explanation, but every plate teaches a lesson. Here are the highlights:

1. Underground Salami

On the first morning of the trip, the bus stops at a flat, muddy, cold-looking farm in the middle of no-where. Middle-aged men huddle around wood fires with big, steel cauldrons. We enter an oversized barn/garage where sliced pork has been sorted in two enormous piles on a table. Red, purple, and brownish organs hang from hooks, slowly dripping blood and other liquids.

This is a sort of Fight Club of cured meats. These guys kill a pig once or twice during the winter, and Angelo, their friend, butchers the animal and makes salami, prosciutto, culatello, and lardo strictly for their own consumption.

While Angelo works on the salami, the other guys take turns stirring the outdoor cauldron, where the make fried pork skins. (Basically frying pork fat in pork fat) They serve us some, and the crumbly, dense, crunchiness is not unlike the insides of a Butterfinger. The taste is of pork, pork fat, and things you might scrape off your oven. A bit too much for me.

The salame and prosciutto, however, are beautiful. Fresh, clean-tasting, not too salty. They serve us everything they make, along with bread and focaccia, and plenty of sparkling wine. Not a bad way to start a study trip (at 10:30 in the morning). After tasting their products, we quickly understand why these men go to such lengths to keep a tradition like this alive.

2. Stuffed Pasta

The tradition of making "pasta sfoglia", or sheets of pasta, and stuffing them with delicious things, runs deep in the region. They used to judge a woman's potential as a wife by how thin she could roll her pasta: the best "sfoglinas" could make pasta so thin you could see the church tower when holding up the stretchy, golden dough to a window.

Clearly, none of these honored techniques have been lost. We ate stuffed pasta in a church basement, at posh two-story restaurants, cozy wine-bars in Parma, and at a funky agriturismo in the country side. Every time, the pasta was amazing: soft, pliable, with a delicate chewiness.

The simple fillings, potato and parmigiano or ricotta and herbs, often made for the tastiest tortelli, crespelle, and tortelloni. They seem to understand that although the filling is important, the homemade, perfectly rendered pasta should shine. And shine it did.

A satisfying, essential food, these perfect pastas also make me cringe with regret for all the doughy, bland, watery ravioli I've eaten back in the states.

3. Parmigiano-Reggiano

I've always had a soft spot for this hard cheese. On the trip, we saw the cows that produce the milk, we saw cheese makers, we visited the consortium, and saw a massive facility where thousands of the cheeses are aged.

We also learned quite a bit about the stuff. See "Parmigiano-Reggiano information" below for the key stats. More importantly, we ate a lot of cheese, both in pure form and incorporated into some great dishes.

My favorite "straight up" PR was a 28-month Red Cow cheese. At this age, the cheese still has a freshness to it, it melts easily in your mouth, and gives up flavors of caramelized fruit, nuts, and toasted brioche. In less technical terms, it creates a flavor explosion/party for your palate.

Surprisingly, a sweet-dessert stands alone as the best dish incorporating PR. At a lunch featuring the cheese in every course, the chef finished the meal with a simple cake made with pears and tons of Parmigiano-Reggiano. Italian desserts are usually weak, but this was fantastic: not too sweet, a little salty, complex, and satisfying like a perfectly balanced, tangy cheesecake. After a three course Parmigiano-Reggiano assault, we would have had seconds of the cake if they brought us more. It was that good.

Our cheese-makers hard at work.

Important Parmigiano Reggiano Information

The name Parmigiano-Reggiano started in the 1930's, when the regions of Parma and Reggia formed a consortium to protect the origin and quality of their cheeses. Before that, "Parmigiano" and "Reggiano" were two almost identical cheeses with different names, and these products fell into the much larger category of "grana" cheese, which is made throughout northern Italy.

The Parmigiano-Reggiano consortium enforces strict quality standards: the cows must be fed without silage (fermented corn feed), and 50% of their feed must be produced by the dairy farmers. They must keep the milk at eighteen celsius (64 farenheit), which means they deliver fresh milk to the cheese-makers twice a day. Once made, the cheese must be aged at least twelve months before it earns its Parmigiano-Reggiano namesake.

The cheese is made with whole milk from the morning mixed with semi-skim milk from the evening milking. Lower in fat than most cheeses, PR is also easy to digest. The aging process does must of the digestion for you, so Parmigiano-Reggiano only takes thirty minutes to digest while fresh cheeses can take up to three hours.