Event management team member Gina Sabatini is also in the food and wine teams, giving us an insider’s edge to our James Beard menu production progress. She recently came across, firsthand, or rather first-palate, a unique Tuscan blue sheep’s milk cheese that gives Roquefort a run for its money!
Fattoria Corzano e Paterno Pecorino Blue Cheese – When you walk into a cheese shop in Florence you can be overwhelmed by the variety of cheeses they have to offer; there are cheeses you know, the ones you never saw before, the ones you really want to try, the smelly ones, soft ones, hard ones, the list goes on. Of these many options a Florentine staple is a pecorino cheese. Pecorino is a sheep’s milk cheese, the name coming from the Italian word pecora meaning sheep. Corzano and Paterno is one producer that creates fine blue sheep’s milk cheese. The farm was inherited by the Gelpke and Goldschidt families from a swiss architect Wendelin Gelpke. Wendelin Gelpke purchased land in 1969 near the Chianti area of Tuscany, one property in Corzano and another one in Paterno a few years later. Today the farm produces wine, olive oil, artisan cheeses and also offers “agriturismo,” a vacation on the farm property. Guests stay in farmhouses that were all restored and can be a great escape for the modern traveler.
The farm started their cheese production in the early 1990s with all cheeses made by hand with traditional methods. The milk from the sheep is processed in Casa Corzano on the property with the sheep just outside on the fields. The farm raises Sardinian sheep exclusively, and in the spring when they have the most milk the farm is busy everyday tending to their herd but by August it ends until late fall. The cheese varieties offered on this farm are all the products of years of experimentation. Today they offer a selection of ten cheese types ranging from the pecorino to roquefort cheese. One of the special cheeses of the farm is the blu cheese they make. This was a personal experiment by Mr. Gelpke, he wanted to create a type of roquefort but was told that it would be too difficult and require a high level of expertise. Through trials and testing they found that they had made a delicious blu cheese. The color is white with greenish black areas and just the right about of blue veins. Its crumbly texture makes it perfect for a salad or melted in risotto. These cheeses can be purchased from the farm or found at high end delicatessens in Florence. For our James Beard events in New York at the end of this month we will bring a taste of this unique cheese with us in various forms including a blue cheese fondue served with polenta.
http://corzanoepaterno.com/cheese/blue/
– Gina Sabatini, Wine Expertise Team