Cheese, please
Hants County man bringing handcrafted Italian cheeses to local plates
Even with his far-from-perfect English, Ciro Comencini can make himself understood and make you laugh.
If you express amazement that he and his wife have six children, for example, he says “we don’t too much like the televison,” and you know exactly what he’s getting at.
Comencini and his brood live in Woodville, Hants County, where they produce cheeses to sell to restaurants and at farmers’ markets.
Cheeses you know - like fresh mozzarella and asiago - and cheeses maybe you don’t, like scaramoza and stracchino.
Verona to Woodville
He emigrated to Nova Scotia from Italy in 2010. Why Nova Scotia? Comencini gave a long, entertaining answer when a culinary student at NSCC Akerley asked him that during a cheese seminar. Apart from his allusion to “a couple of connections,” that audience still isn’t sure why he chose to live here, though he may have described Canada as “mama, a very generous mama.”
(If you’re an old enough baseball fan, you’ll recall that reporters daily surrounded Mets manager Casey Stengel because of his colourful way of speaking, but could never adequately reproduce his speeches in print).
Comencini grew up on a dairy farm on the side of a mountain an hour from the city of Verona, and started making five different fresh cheeses twice a week at the age of seven.
He didn’t become a cheese maker because that was his dream, he made cheese because his family made cheese, and that was the way it was.
“If they had been cobblers, I would be a cobbler,” he said.
Eventually, mechanization in the Italian dairy industry made cheese making less profitable and less enjoyable. But by the time Comencini emigrated, he had acquired a wealth of knowledge that benefits his customers and the future chefs to whom he occasionally lectures.
Those students learn that cows fed silage instead of hay may produce milk containing a bacteria that can cause a wheel of cheese to split, even six months after it’s been made; that when clover is prevalent in the grass in the spring, you can taste it in the cheese; and that there’s no need for a small producer to try to make every batch of cheese identical.
The cheeses he makes here from milk sourced at neighbouring dairy farms are the same ones he made in Italy.
“Asiago was the biggest, then tallegio, then mozzarella, ricotta, burratta, stracchino a bit,” Comencini said.
“In our last days in Italy, we always tried to have different stuff, so if a guy wanted something fresh he bought mozzarella, like I do now at the market. Give the choice to the people.”
Getting your hands on the cheese
Comencini sells at the Alderney Market in Dartmouth and is contemplating a second counter in Halifax. He sells a few dozen balls of mozzarella each week, and wedges of asiago, which he doesn’t try to standardize.
“I cut in chunks and sell each,” he said. “The people I see they like to spend $7 or $8 and come every week, instead of buying a big piece every second week. They like that, to see you and to talk.”
The restaurant trade is seasonal. He has about 30 clients, more of them in the summer.
“Some buy weekly, some every Ciro Comencini and his daughter Linda, 13, work together to prepare their cheese for the weekend market. second month, some once in a while when they do a special item,” said Comencini, who does his own deliveries and finds chefs enjoyable and sometimes challenging.
“And they always got the knife in their hand, a big one too, and they know how to use it.”
One steady customer is Terry Vassallo, chef-owner of Mappatura Bistro, who said he had an epiphany the first time he tasted one of Comencini’s cheeses.
“What it comes down to is the quality of the product. It’s quite a story, when he was younger and the other kids were playing soccer, he was up on the mountain making cheese with his uncle. They herded the sheep and the cows and produced the milk … and that’s reflected in his product,” the chef said.
“There’s nuances that only come out in a really great product … when a real artisan is at the helm. We use his tallegio in a warm winter salad and we get unbelievable compliments on it. And it has to be about the cheese because the other ingredients are things like squash and beets.”
Of his six kids, Comencini’s oldest, his 13-year old daughter, is showing the most cheese-making acumen so far. He was asked if he hopes one of the kids — with more education than him, more familiar with Canadian customs, and not limited by language — will take over the business someday.
“They have to. More than one. I don’t work just for myself, there is no choice in my family, they have to do that.”