Pecorino Toscano

Pecorino belongs to the pastoral tradition of the Tuscan hills, where sheep have been milked since Etruscan and Roman times; Pliny the Elder praised the region's sheep's cheeses in his first-century Naturalis Historia. For centuries the young spring cheese was called marzolino, after the March in which milking and making began; the Renaissance prized it, and it is remembered as a favourite at the Medici table of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The little town of Pienza, rebuilt as a model Renaissance city under Pope Pius II, and the surrounding Val d'Orcia became its most celebrated cradle. It won its DOP in 1996, the protected zone covering all of Tuscany with a few bordering communes of Lazio and Umbria, and the disciplinare admits only whole sheep's milk and veal rennet.

On the board a young Pecorino Toscano is pale and springy, its paste sweet and milky with a clean, gently tangy finish; an aged wheel is a deeper straw-gold, firm and slightly grainy, its flavour warm and nutty with a savoury edge. Both are classically eaten with Tuscan bread, and the aged cheese with honey, pears or young broad beans.

The cheese is built by two chemistries. Rennet's enzyme chymosin snips the kappa-casein that keeps the milk's casein micelles apart, so calcium bridges draw them into a firm gel; the size of the cut curd then sets the moisture, hazelnut grains holding whey for a soft cheese and corn-kernel grains shedding it for one that will age. In the warm ripening room lactic bacteria ferment lactose to lactic acid, lowering the pH so the curd knits and the whey runs off, while salt draws out more water and checks spoilage microbes. During months of aging, residual rennet and microbial enzymes slowly break the casein into peptides and free amino acids that build savoury depth, and lipases split the milk fat into free fatty acids that give the nutty, piquant aroma; as water evaporates the flavour concentrates and the paste hardens.