Makes n Cakes

Il mio ufficio

Day one at Corzano e Paterno was a wash. Due to my boss/host's graciousness, I was given the opportunity to sleep and settle in, which meant getting out of bed at 11am after approximately 12 hours of DEAHTLIKE slumber (even so I was woozy from a combination of lack of sleep and overdosing on L-tryptophan and melatonin -- AND YOU THOUGHT MY PARTYING DAYS WERE BEHIND ME). I rolled up to the large green doors of the dairy just as Toni, Eleonora and Eduardo were finishing for the day, so all that was to be done was to have lunch with Toni -- a spread of salad, bread, proscuitto, a fresh sheep cheese rolled in erba cipollina (chives) and a somewhat more complex cheese called Marzolino, which is based on a traditional Tuscan sheep cheese made with vegetable rennet and aged for just 3 or 4 days. It's a much milder, richer flavor than that of a fresh goat cheese, and before I realized it I'd eaten a third of the hunk laid out in front of me. #danger

As I still don't have wheels of my own (which will prove challenging being that I don't really know how to drive stick), I hitched a ride into town with Toni to shop for groceries at the co-op in the next village over, Tavarnelle, which has a disco bar, an ice rink, a post office, a tabac filled with people playing scratch lotto, and not much else as far as I could tell. One of my all time favorite things to do in a foreign (and for that matter, non-foreign) land is to grocery shop. You can tell a lot about a culture based upon the pride of place that they give to different foodstuffs. For example, at grocery stores in Vermont, I noticed a plethora of iterations of ranch dressing (Bacon Ranch, Chipotle Ranch, Blue Cheese Ranch, Low Fat Ranch), Oreos (literally I counted five different kinds), and powdered gravy mix. In Italy, the produce and dairy section is expansive, as is the biscotti aisle, and the various types and textures of canned tomato is truly astounding (side note: you can buy every fucking stripe of amaro and other drinking bitter under the sun, and it's stocked right next to the goddamned orange juice). Take from this what you will.

I stocked up on speck (WHEN IN ITALY AMIRITE) and pesto and mozzarella and yogurt and romanesco and cannellini beans and smoked salmon and fresh pasta and arugula and figs and pears and coffee -- you know, the basics -- and, fully laden with my haul, stowed my shit in the back of Toni's car and attempted, unsuccessfully, to procure a local SIM card for my cell phone. I had better luck at the "electric" shop, a little boite Toni told me is one of the few remaining really old school Italian storefronts, which seemed to deal in anything and everything with an electrical cord (its only guiding principal), smelled of old newspapers and stale cigarette smoke, and was run by an old couple and, presumably, their son. I managed to buy two electrical adapters for my various electronics, which is borderline superfluous considering my sundry devices receive almost no service inside my thick-walled, stone-hewn flat.

Errands complete, I headed back to my new, temporary home, having moved from Joshi and Toni's guest room into a flat normally used for (paying) visitors. On paper, I'm sharing the space with Giulia, the beautiful girl who's been working in the cellar for the last 4 months and in the shop for the last two, but who just began dating one of Toni and Joshi's sons, so is spending her nights at their place. So effectively what I am telling you is that I have a huge, three bedroom villa with a fireplace, kitchen, dining room and living room all to myself. The digs are fucking ill to say the least. Because I am responsible, I decided to immediately do a load of wash, and only after I'd patted myself on the back for figuring out the washing machine did I realize that I'd used fabric softener instead of detergent to wash my clothes #toolittletoolate #myunderpantsfeellikeababysealsunderbelly

A few other minor challenges regarding domestic tools (even the can openers are funny here) dictated what my dinner options were, and after several minutes trying to decipher the symbology of the oven, I was able to roast myself some vegetables and make a little salad and some pesto toast for supper before showering (a comical series of spatial miscalculations involving a detachable shower head and an accordion-paned shower screen) and got into bed, this time with the full presence of Macchiavelli's ghost making itself known just behind the wardrobe in my room.


Day broke outside my window, which looks northeast, and I was rendered goddamned dumbfounded yet again at the stupidly gorgeous expanse of pinky orange sky, hilltop, and little stamp-sized villas outside my little turret. After coffee and breakfast, I trudged outside and walked approximately 30 yards down the gravel path to the dairy, just in time to see Joshi stationed out back cleaning the pipes and tubes that would eventually join the mobile milk tank sitting in the back of his truck with the stationary one outside the dairy that holds the milk before it's siphoned inside and dumped into one of two vats. Once he finished, he was off to the Paterno side of the property where the sheeps reside to pick up the milk for the day.

We had 45 minutes to set up in the interim, so I met Eleonora, my adorable co-worker who legit looks like a blonde Mila Kunis, Eduardo, and Toni in the dairy and began by flipping the square shaped, bloomy rinded Rocco's and the ash-ripened Rocco Carbones from the previous day, attaching various pipes to other pipes inside the cheeseroom and setting up the forms, which are set five deep on top of a steam table and overlaid with aluminum covers with holes that line up perfectly with the forms so that curds can be dumped on top and swept into them without making a huge mess. When the milk arrived and was thermalised (a process I didn't entirely witness but which I believe simply involved being warmed in a small bucket of water before being run through the hose into the vat) we began receiving the milk in 50 liter plastic milk jugs and dumped 300 liters worth in to the large, raised caldron set into the corner of the room. This curd would be used to make the Buccia di Rospo, a softer, higher moisture version of Pecorino that originated as a mistake when Toni was attemtping to make a Pecorino but kept the curds too big. (Evidently the name means "Toad Skins" because the rind eventually winds up irregularly textured and greyish in color).  The remaining milk, which amounted to 375 liters, wound up in the main vat which has a place to attach knives and a paddle for mechanical cutting and stirring. This would wind up being for Zaffero, a cheese that is infused with saffron and then mixed with green peppercorns.

Powdered starter culture and penicillium candidum were added to both, and both were stirred and heated until it was time to add the rennet. Toni says she doesn't futz around too much with measuring the pH or the temperature, as at this point, after 25 years or so, she can tell by feel and smell when the milk is ready. I was ordered to wash the copious amount of forms from the previous day so I was unable to observe her adding the rennet, but flocculation time was just long enough for us all to bust out to the shop for an espresso and a plate full of dolce, which I am hoping to god was simply because it was Eduardo's birthday and not a daily ritual because if so I will need to start wearing maternity clothes asap. I'm all for a mid-morning shot of caffeine but if it's taken with a side of mascarpone and chocolate I am truly fucked #jeansarealreadytighterthantheyweretwodaysago

Zaffero

After some casual morning desserts #normale, it was back to the dairy, where Toni hand-cut the curd for the Buccia and affixed the knives for the curd to be cut and stirred in the vat that would eventually be for the Zaffero.  After dumping the Buccia curd into their little whack-a-mole holes and scooping the extra into large forms lined with cheese cloth, I was tasked with ladling a bit of whey from the Zaffero vat, to which I then added 3 grams of saffron, which were conveniently packaged in sachets of .1 grams each, requiring opening and ever so carefully scraping out roughly 12 packages worth of of saffron with a sharp knife -- not the first time my cheese endeavors hearkened back to other, less savory powdered pursuits. When this step was finished, the infused whey was added back into the vat and stirred to incorporate, before the entire vat was raised mechanically so that it would be roughly the same height as the draining table. Dumping and straining ensued, and after most of the whey had trickled out, we added in the green peppercorns and proceeded to scoop the curd into large square forms -- five in all.

And thus, make number one was complete. The Buccia would be moved out of the steam table to make room for the Zaffero, which would get a flip at some point later in the afternoon.

Lunch with Giulia at our flat followed -- she threw together a tomato and fennel salad and I contributed my speck and leftover roasted vegetables. But when she suggested dessert, I had to draw the line. Because I am, for the first time in my life, a pillar of abstention. JK because here I sit, having only just digested my late and leisurely lunch, contemplating what to make for dinner. I think I was made for this life.

A dopo.