Ragusano DOP

Ragusano is the heir of the caci once made across the Iblei highlands, and the name caciocavallo, 'horse cheese', records the way the tied forms were slung 'a cavallo', astride a wooden beam, to dry and age in the humid stone cellars the locals call maiazzè. Its trade was old and valuable: a tax record of 1515, under Ferdinand and Charles V, granted the cheese a duty exemption for export, and it travelled by sea across the Mediterranean. In 1808 the abbot Paolo Balsamo judged the local cheeses fifty per cent finer than the common sort, and in 1856 Filippo Garofalo wrote of their fame and delicacy. The cheese is made from the raw milk of the native Modicana cow on winter-to-spring pasture from November to May, and won its DOP in 1996, its production limited to twelve towns in the province of Ragusa and three in Siracusa.

A young Ragusano is pale gold, supple and mild, sweet and buttery with a faint tang from the raw milk. With longer aging the paste deepens to straw gold, firms and flakes at the break, and the taste builds a savoury, peppery, piquant length. The grazing shows through as a green, hay-like note that sets it apart from cheese made on silage.

Ragusano is a pasta-filata cheese, so its making turns on acid and heat. Lactic bacteria natural to the raw milk ferment lactose to lactic acid, lowering the pH until the calcium is drawn out of the casein and the curd will stretch. Bathed in water around 80°C, the para-casein turns plastic and is pulled and folded so its protein fibres line up in long parallel strands, trapping fat and moisture between them. Aging does the rest: over months to more than a year, residual rennet and microbial enzymes break the casein down into savoury peptides and amino acids, lipases split the milk fat into free fatty acids for the piquant edge, and steady moisture loss concentrates the flavour and firms the paste. Because the milk is raw and the cows graze fresh winter pasture, its carotenoids and aroma compounds carry into the golden colour and grassy scent.