Parmigiano-Reggiano: Italy’s ‘practically perfect’ food

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Much more than a fancy way to say “parmesan”, Parmigiano-Reggiano is a cheese that can only be made with extremely precise ingredients, in an extraordinarily particular process, in a 10,000-sq-km geographical area of Italy so carefully defined that you can make Parmigiano on one side of the small city of Bologna but not the other. At the headquarters of the Parmigiano-Reggiano Consortium in the city of Reggio Emilia, president Nicola Bertinelli, whose family has made Parmigiano at their farm since 1895, asked me to take a guess: out of 10 wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano sold in the world, how many are real? “The secret of this cheese isn’t just the type of cow that produces the milk, but what the animals eat,” said Luca Caramaschi, the owner of Parmigiano factory Caseificio San Bernardino.

Source: www.bbc.com