On a quest for Gorgonzola
A trip through Northern Italy reveals the path to authenticity
GORGONZOLA, ITALY — The creamy sauce looked a little pale against the fresh egg noodles, but the flecks of chopped green pistachio fed the eyes. My American friends and I had come a long way for this plate of pasta. It had better be good.
Ever since I spotted the name “Gorgonzola” on a map more than a decade ago, I’ve wanted to visit the town that gave its name to the soft blueveined cheese to see how it’s made and to taste it at its source. This was my chance to cross it off my foodie bucket list.
A week earlier, about 20 of us had descended on a villa in Northern Italy to celebrate a friend’s milestone birthday. We had traveled from all over — California; Washington; New York; Nice, France; even Istanbul — and we shared a love of good food. Days were spent at markets and wineries, sampling the goods and stocking up on things to cart back home.
On my last day with the group, four of us squeezed our luggage into a rental car and headed northeast from the Northern Italian region of Piedmont into Lombardy and past Milan. We were on a mission to find Gorgonzola: the town of about 20,000 people, and the cheese. After navigating the one-way streets, we reached our destination, La Vineria del Centro, and parked near a piazza.
The menu offered dishes like strips of beef with a Gorgonzola sauce or macaroni with Gorgonzola and asparagus accented with crispy bacon like bits. I ordered the bowl of tagliolini egg noodles with the pistachio bits and Gorgonzola sauce. The flavor was rich, a little salty and almost buttery; the pasta properly al dente. I might have liked more of the pistachios, but for 8 euros (about $9.30 in U.S. dollars at the time), it was a satisfying lunch.
Then we got the surprising news.
Gorgonzola, our waiter said, was no longer produced in Gorgonzola, the site of its legendary birth. “You have to go to Novara,” he said, on the opposite side of Milan, to find it.
“There is one guy here who still makes it,” the server added, “but he uses sheep’s milk instead of cow’s.”
Turns out that Gorgonzola must be made with full-fat cow’s milk in order to qualify for denominazione di origine protetta (“protected designation of origin”) status under European Union regulations and earn the official red and yellow logo on its label.
Two trains and an overnight stay in Milan later, I was met at the Novara train station by Paolo Leonardi, who manages exports for Igor Group, a company with roots that stretch to 1935 when “Grandpa” Natale Leonardi began making handcrafted cheese in Mezzomerico, his small village. Today, Igor is a large, modernized operation with about 200 employees who produce 2 million wheels of Gorgonzola a year.
“For a cheese to be labeled as a true Gorgonzola,” Leonardi said, “it must be produced in one of 15 provinces in two regions: Lombardy or Piedmont. If it’s made outside of this area, it is not a true Gorgonzola. In addition, it must be made with milk coming from a farm in this area, and half of the feed given to the cows must have been grown within these regions.”
Comparing his company’s Italian blue with, say, a famous French one, Leonardi says, “The products are very different. Roquefort is a very nice cheese, but it’s made with sheep’s milk. Gorgonzola is made with pasteurized milk, while Roquefort is not. Gorgonzola offers a more variable range of tastes from sweet to the spicy and more intense. Roquefort has a specific taste, closer in certain aspects to our sharper Gorgonzola piccante.”
Spreading the word to consumers also means expanding their repertoire beyond a basic sauce for pasta or a smear on a slice of bread.
While in “Ulysses,” James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom asks for a Gorgonzola sandwich, Leonardi says his favorite way to eat the cheese is in a risotto that incorporates chunks of pumpkin and crumbled amaretti cookies.
“It’s really fantastic,” he said. “For us, to teach how to use Gorgonzola is very important.”