You need yesterday’s whey to make today’s cheese.

Histology students, are you still with us? Let's discuss adipocytes- ours have probably grown 30% since we have set foot in Italy (our hepatocytes are another story- is it bad to come home from vacation with ascites?)
Parma’s pride and joy lies in their cheese and ham, so not surprisingly one of the most raved about traveller experiences in Parma is a tour of the factories that produce these products. It seems that one of the few companies that offer such tours is Parmagolosa. Sign us up!
We met our guide bright and early on Monday morning. Expecting Italianglish, we were surprised to be greeted with an English accent! Our guide had just moved back from London where she had worked as a translator.

First stop Parmigiano Reggiano facility. I am going to have to try very hard to keep myself from babbling about this tour too much- I found it positively fascinating! If you want to know more, ask me when we get home and I’m sure I will gush on and on. For now I will keep it to an abbreviated ramble.
We pulled into the parking lot of what looked like a very old stone church. Men were working on the building doing what looked like renovations. Our guide showed us the Holstein cows whose milk is used for the cheese. There are very strict regulations governing all aspects of the cheese production (except sterility- more on that later). If these rules are not followed the cheese cannot carry that esteemed Parmigiano Reggiano designation. The cows get some fancy treatment- mostly pertaining to food and water. They are milked twice a day, the milk from the evening milking is skimmed for the cheese and the morning milk is added whole. Then we moved on to the cheese making area.

Expecting to watch the production through a window or having to don hairnets and gowns to enter, I was a little surprised when we strolled right into the middle of the process through a huge, wide open door. The environment was far more casual than I would have thought, in fact I don’t think the staff would’ve batted an eye if I dipped my finger into one of the large copper cauldrons to have a taste!

There were five of these cauldrons with two young, muscular, Italian men working over them- yes ladies and queens there are pictures- hold your horses!

There are several steps to making the cheese but in short form they go like this:
The milk (as described above) is put in the cauldrons and heated along some of yesterday’s whey.
The rennin (an enzyme from calves stomachs) is added which curdles the milk
The curdled milk settles to the bottom where it is left for 20 minutes
The muscular men lift the curds with a paddle (okay don’t get too excited- there’s no pictures I was busy watching!) and put it in cheese cloth
After a while it gets sliced in half and eventually put in molds
After resting in the molds for the afternoon (yes in the building that is wide open to the elements and bugs) it gets put in a salty brine for about a month.
The cheese then goes to age in a warehouse for three years
The lack of sterility doesn’t seem to be an issue as the Parmigiano consortium (cheese Nazi’s) rigidly test each of thousands of wheels of cheese in the warehouse with a hammer at their one year and three year birthday. (A little aside here: I think Adam has spent too long in Canada- he has an objection to the term “cheese Nazi”- and here I thought I had married a politically incorrect Australian) The substandard cheese has a number of destinies ranging from gratings for cheese blends to animal food depending on the severity of the defect.
This tour blew us away for a few reasons:
-Everything was being done by hand, the only machine we saw was one for flipping the aging cheese in the warehouse once a month- but even that was broken and a man was hand turning them all
-The warehouse- one of many in the region, housed thousands of wheels of cheese (who eats all this cheese?)
-All of this cheese is produced by small family owned dairies- the largest one making only 14 wheels/day. No large corporations here!
-The rules… tons of rules to achieve the Parmigianno Reggiano stamp of approval

After the cheese we moved onto the prosciutto di Parma facility…
The process is modelled after traditional techniques. Basically, the ham legs (all from male piggies because the females are too fat) go through a process of salt curing and massaging to remove most of the moisture. In between curing processes they are rotated between a number of climate controlled rooms that emulate the seasonal temperatures. The prosciutto is also subject to the rules of a consortium (ham Nazis).

Last but not least, we moved on to a winery where traditional balsamic vinegar is produced. Again, this is another very small production facility where everything is done by hand. The vinegar is produced from cooked grape must and is put into a large barrel. There are five successively smaller barrels that get topped up each year from the barrel of the next size up. The result is a very small barrel of thick, syrupy vinegar that has a minimum age of 25 years (the barrel is never completely emptied so the 25 year vinegar ends up mixing with vinegar of up to 80 years old). The oldest vinegar has a large sugar content that masks it’s acidity and it is classically used as a dessert item i.e. on vanilla gelato, strawberries, and cakes. At 85 Euro/ 250 ml, we were grateful to have the opportunity to try a teaspoonful!
Anyone hungry now? We certainly were by the time we finished our tour!