Wood-Fired Pecorino, Basilicata
Matt Goulding
Many of Italy’s fiercest food fighters work to preserve a physical entity, an ingredient or a species threatened by the inexorable march of modernity, but what this couple fights for is even bigger: a rapidly vanishing way of life. Now in their seventies and living on the border of Basilicata and Puglia, they make cheese the way nobody else does anymore: They raise goats and sheep, then warm the milk over a fire of fig branches. This is cheese so elemental it doesn’t have a name, just a description: fresh, three-month, six-month. The hard cheese makes a heroic hunk to drop on a dinner table; the soft, fresh cheese is there to be stuffed into ravioli or slathered on toasted bread with sliced figs or a drizzle of honey. To taste the sheep’s-milk ricotta straight from the bubbling cauldron is to ruin yourself for all other ricotta going forward (a risk worth taking). “We don’t do anything special. We just do it the way it’s always been done.” These days, that qualifies as something very special, indeed.