A pasta filata cow's-milk cheese from Santa Croce di Magliano, in the Campobasso hills toward Puglia, hand-braided into a plait about a metre long, twenty centimetres wide and weighing one to one and a half kilos. White and milky when fresh, turning pale straw over a few days, it is made in tiny quantity for the spring feasts and eaten in torn strips with bread, salumi and red wine.
The treccia belongs to the transhumance that once moved flocks along the Celano–Foggia tratturo, the great drove road linking the Abruzzo mountains to the Puglian plain, and it is one of the rare Italian cheeses with a propitiatory, religious meaning. It is made for the feast of the Madonna dell'Incoronata, on the last Saturday of April, and for the patron San Giacomo, when shepherds and even their animals once wore the braid round the neck like a scarf as a good-omen rite for the harvest, a custom sung in early-twentieth-century dialect verse by Don Raffaele Capriglione. Now made in about a thousand kilos a year by a single producer, it is a Slow Food Ark of Taste cheese and a listed Molise traditional product.
Fresh and mild, with the gentle sweetness of young spun curd and a soft, layered pull where the braid comes apart in strands. Barely salted and very moist, it squeaks lightly against the teeth, then softens; a plait shared at a feast is torn rather than sliced.
Like all pasta filata cheeses, the treccia depends on acidifying the curd before it is stretched. Rennet coagulates the raw milk, then lactic-acid bacteria ferment the lactose and drop the pH to around 5.2, at which point the casein network can be melted and drawn out in hot water into long, aligned protein fibres. Bathing the curd in boiling whey and then boiling water makes it plastic; pulling and braiding the hot strands sets that fibrous grain into the plait. Left unsalted and unripened, it holds a high moisture and keeps only briefly, whitest and sweetest in the first day or two.
Variations
The braid is the point, and the differences are of size and hand: a shorter plait, a tighter braid, more or fewer strands. The strands may be brined for about twenty minutes or dry-salted before braiding, which shifts the salt and the keeping. It is close kin to the region's other spun-curd cheeses, the stracciata and the scamorza, though its worn-round-the-neck religious role is its own; it is eaten within a day or two, torn with bread, cured meats and a glass of red.
On the Palate
Where Treccia di Santa Croce di Magliano sits in the Italian flavor cloud
Ingredients
Serves 10How it's made
7 steps · 20 min
- 140 min
Warm the raw cow's milk to about 37°C and stir in the rennet; leave it to set to a firm curd.
- 2180 min
Break the curd and leave it to ripen in the warm whey until a test piece stretches smoothly in hot water, about two to three hours.
Watch outTest-stretch a pinch in hot water — the curd's ready to pull only when it draws into a smooth, unbroken strand; too soon and it tears.
- 310 min
Drain the ripened curd into a tub and cover it first with boiling whey, then with boiling water, so it turns to soft, pliable pasta filata.
- 415 min
Work the hot curd, pulling it into long, even strands the thickness of a thumb.
Watch outWork the curd while it's hot and pliable, pulling into even thumb-thick strands — let it cool and it stiffens and won't stretch or braid.
- 520 min
Immerse the strands in salted water for about twenty minutes, or salt them dry.
- 615 min
Braid the strands by hand into a plait about a metre long and twenty centimetres wide, weighing one to one and a half kilos.
- 715 min
Cool the braid, then serve it fresh within a day or two, torn into strips with bread, salumi and red wine.
