Stracchino all’Antica delle Valli Orobiche

For centuries the stracchino produced in the Taleggio Valley was considered the best, as the first Touring Club Gastronomic Guide of 1931 points out, and so they began to call “Taleggio” all cheeses of that type, even if they were not produced locally or with different techniques. To this day, stracchino all’antica is made by “hot milking,” that is, with freshly milked milk, which used to be put immediately into square wheels ready to be transported.
The Slow Food Presidium regulations state that the production area must be restricted to the area of origin: the Brembana Valley and the confluent valleys of Serina, Taleggio and Imagna.
In the mouth you will feel stracchino all’antica initially sweet and then savory and bitterish, sometimes with sensations of spiciness. Smell and aroma are complex with medium-high persistence: lactic cooked-melted butter; vegetal-hay, fresh mushrooms; fruity-citrus; animal-stable, leather, meat broth and sometimes spicy-white pepper. It has good solubility, is not very sticky and moist.

Dishes you can make with this excellent ingredient include lasagna and sauce for succulent meats; you can enjoy it with simple steamed vegetables or, a great classic, with polenta bergamasca.

Do you know why it is called stracchino?
In Bergamascan, stracch means “tired,” and it seems that this cheese gets its name from the tiredness of cows (and shepherds at the end of the day) during the transhumance period.
Moving every day from one mountain pasture to another (cargà ‘l mut) was in fact very tiring; when they stopped in the evening, having reached their planned stopping place, the shepherds prepared stracch.
The processing had to be fast, since the next day the cattle had to be moved to another pasture.
The cheeses were then immediately placed in rectangular wooden crates created especially to hold them precisely and were placed on the sides of mules: this is why in the eighteenth century it was called strachì da viaz.
It is the progenitor of the large stracchino family that includes many delicious cheeses: from the tender stracchinelli to the Bergamo D.O.P. cheeses of taleggio, quartirolo, salva, strachitunt and gorgonzola.