Traditional gorgonzola from a 100-year-old family business
Back in 1999, when we were partway through our 17th summer in business at the Deli, I took a trip to Italy to visit an array of artisan producers we might want to buy from. When I got back, I typed up some notes about my favorite finds. Top of the list was the traditionally made Gorgonzola Naturale from the family-owned firm of Ciresa in the mountains of Lombardy:
I was extremely impressed with the Ciresa family. Their headquarters are in Introbbio, in the Valsassina (pronounced “Val-sá-see-na”). It’s a beautiful valley in the Italian Alps, half an hour or so from the Swiss border, near Lake Como. They’ve been in the cheese business doing maturing cheese since 1927. Gradually they moved into actual production as well, and now do a lot of both. My take is that they’re like I’d envision Neal’s Yard Dairy in 50 years. They’ve got lots of high-tech shipping, computers, etc. But when you go in the coolers, the cheeses are getting hand turned and hand rubbed, they’re matured on wooden shelves, there’s lots of mold-covered mountain cheeses from small dairies, and they seem to know every dairy, every farmer, every cheese, and every cheese shop in the area. I looked at a 40-year-old brochure of theirs from the 1950s and their main items are exactly the same as they were then.
Natural Law #11 reminds me regularly that making something great happen takes a lot longer than most people think. That’s the case here. A quarter century later, Ciresa’s artisan cheese has finally arrived on our counter.
Ciresa’s history, as I said in my notes, started almost a century ago, in 1927, when Giovanni Ciresa, decided to pursue cheese maturing for his full-time profession. By coincidence, at the time, he was the same age I was when we started the Deli, 25. His father had worked in a dairy, so the cheese world was already well familiar to him. Five years later, the then 30-year-old Ciresa built the first warehouse of the now burgeoning family business.
Nicola, the adopted third son of the family, remembers his father, back in the day, making cheese as it was once done, by putting copper wires into the cheese:
This is where the green came from. If you used iron, you didn’t get much green. Much bluer mold. The penicillium has been added since the middle of the 20th century. I remember my father buying this cheese from farmers and putting wires and then putting it into the caves to age. The wires made the mold. They used to pack the basement with snow. The snow would last until the end of the next summer.
Today, there is no longer any farmhouse Gorgonzola. It’s all made in dairies, using pasteurized milk. Young cheeses are no longer pierced with copper, but instead with stainless steel needles. Today there’s a machine to poke the holes—90 to 100 holes for each cheese. The bigger the holes, the bigger the veining. Sometimes the machines miss a few spots on the edge so they finish them by hand. That said, not all Gorgonzola is the same—Ciresa’s is something special. And you can absolutely taste the difference. Ciresa’s traditional Gorgonzola Naturale has less moisture in the curd than most. Longer aging. Lower yield in solids so it takes more milk to produce. In the old days, the mold was in the air. When I visited, they would all point proudly to the red rind, in Italian, the crosta rossa. Vittorio Ciresa, Giovanni’s son, shared during the visit:
If you don’t follow tradition, you get a mediocre product. To follow tradition, you should use dry salt. Only dry salt. It must be mounded on top to develop proper acidity. We use fine salt for the outside. Coarse salt for the top. Then after a week, we start to wash with brine. The big companies skip the dry salt—they just wash with brine to save time. It’s a skill to dry salt. You must understand how much salt, and for how long to leave the salt.
While the name Gorgonzola is widespread, there are surprisingly few dairies left that make traditional Gorgonzola Naturale—nearly all producers have shifted to Gorgonzola Dolce, the younger, less matured version, which is easier to make, sweeter in flavor, and easier to sell. When I visited in 1999, the Gorgonzola Dolce already made up a definitive 80% of the market. It’s likely even more than that now.
Nevertheless, I’ve long had a predilection for the old-style Gorgonzola Naturale. Its flavor is rounder and more savory. I love it. Great on toast, in risotto with walnuts, on pasta, in salads, with fresh fruit—it’s a near-perfect pairing with pears! All of which means that I am especially excited that, all these years later, we finally have some of the Ciresa family’s superb Gorgonzola at the Deli. Swing by and try some soon!
