Gordonzola - Old friends and aged cheese -- "A"

Gordonzola - Old friends and aged cheese -- "A"

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April 5th, 2005

08:46 am - Old friends and aged cheese -- "A"
Alan was my first best friend. He lived close by and we didn’t have many neighbors with kids. This was the ‘70s and he was a child of d-i-v-o-r-c-e. So where half the kids I knew of course, but my parents hadn’t quite adjusted to the new decade and I heard worry, pity, and sadness in their voices when they talked to his mom.

And charity, definitely charity. Whenever I did something and Alan wasn’t there my mom wanted to know why not. She was worried he was worried he was getting discriminated against by the stigma of divorce. Probably because that’s what her social set might have done 30 years earlier. But no, he usually wasn’t there because he was visiting his Dad or going on some outing with Mom’s new boyfriend. Again, this was the ‘70s in Marin and Mom had long black hair, peasant dresses, and had a potter’s wheel in the garage next to her VW bug. That combination was like crack for the hippie guys who fancied themselves a little artistic. Or the ones who needed a little more hippie cred because their businesses or investments had started to take off. She had plenty of boyfriends and good for her.

Alan and I used to play war together in the hills where the mansions hadn’t been built yet. Can you still buy toy guns at the supermarket? We had quite a cobbled-together little arsenal of plastic. My brother, who studied enough World War II history and books about guns to be put away in this post-columbine era, critiqued and altered them to look more real. I’m unclear on the exact timeline here, but I think the war on Vietnam hadn’t even ended yet and we would turn every boy’s birthday party into a wargame. I grew up with real guns and had square Republican parents, but I don’t know what these hippie parents were thinking. But then again, by 1975 the countercultural that could was hedging its bets. And these folks weren’t core. They hadn’t gone back to the land, they’d escaped the city and invested in the suburbs.

In fact, Alan’s mom had been getting her real estate degree after finding a limited market for her pots. We did end up going to Alan’s place on field trips from school for the next few years and got to make our own sagging ceramics. But the magic was gone. When the real estate boom hit, Alan’s mom married a sideburned but otherwise clean cute real estate agent and they moved into one of those new places on what used to be hillside. I lost track of Alan because speculating meant moving up and moving a lot. Plus they could afford private school by then and they didn’t want to be bound by school district boundaries. Nothing dramatic happened the last time I saw him back in the day. We just acclimated to different school and different friends and didn’t know what to do with each other when we got too old to play with toy guns in the hills

Asiago is often one of the world’s most overrated cheeses. Customers are surprisingly willing to fight me on this point. I don’t care. They are wrong.

I’m not saying it’s bad, mind you, just too expensive for what you get. Plus my credibility gets called into question when I tell them that the Domestic Stella Asiago with the black wax is better than most of the Italian ones. When I was younger, they would just flat out think I was untrained. Now that I’m older I’ve given in and carry three out of four almost all the time. Buy what you want.

There are four basic kinds: aged Italian, medium aged Italian, young Italian and domestic. It’s from Northern Italy, in the mountain area and blah blah blah. The young one is known as Asiago Pressato. It’s a semi-soft cheese with the consistency of a monterey jack. Comparing a cheese to jack makes fancy shoppers uncomfortable. But hey, I like jack. Anyways, it doesn’t taste exactly like jack it’s more sour and tangy and has much more depth of flavor. This is the one I buy for myself most often. Though it’s called Asiago, it has little resemblance to the others.

The medium, Asiago mezzano, is simply a waste of money unless you can find it for under $10/lb. which in these bad exchange rate days I doubt you can. It’s bland and flavorless in a way that cheese sales reps describe as "subtle". I can see eating this, especially with Italian meats, but not for this much money.

Aged Asiago, vecchio, can be worth the money but we’re talking near $15/lb in most cases. The only one I’d trust would be the Monti Trentini brand. When this cheese ages it gets the odd taste of fermented fruit along with the salty sharpness and nuttiness you’d expect. This taste can turn quickly and overpower everything else despite what the books saying about this being a durable cheese. I mean, it is a durable cheese, it’s lasted for a year or so, but importers seeking a deal will buy pallets of this stuff and there’s a limit to the warehouse aging process.

And then there’s the domestic. There’s no guarantee this cheese isn’t from cows shot up with rBGH and it’s a huge factory production made by Stella who also make some of the world’s worst "Parmesan". But in the end it kicks most Italian asiagos butts. It’s sharp, salty and has that slight vomit aftertaste of an Italian provolone. Oh, I’m not supposed to say vomit… is that what piquant means? Don’t buy it shredded or with a brown wax, but the black wax is a great deal for the money, less spendy than any hard Italian cheese and much, much better than most other non-Italian copy cat cheeses (domestic parmesan, Argentine parmesan etc.)

One of my proudest days as a cheesemonger was cornering my very credentialed purveyor of Italian cheeses, setting up a taste test of the aged asiagos and getting her to admit that the Stella was the best. She swore me to secrecy for life but the satisfaction was mine.