A plate of pasta with a simple tomato sauce is all well and good, but it’s only when you sprinkle some freshly grated cheese on top that it encapsulates everything good about Italian cuisine. Some of the nicest dishes you can have in Italy are often the simplest, and many of them will contain cheese. And while a lot of us might not think about the variety of cheese we’re grating over our dinner, many of the Italian ones have spent years maturing in giant halls. The recipes date back centuries, and Grana Padano – a hard cow’s milk cheese aged for at least nine months (but can be matured for over two years) – is nearly 1,000 years old.
The first records of Grana Padano go back to 1135, where it was made by monks at Chiaravalle Abbey in the Po Valley, in the north of Italy. Back then, making cheese was a way of using surplus milk, and the monks aged it over many months which resulted in its firm, grainy texture and unique flavour. The locals loved it, naming it formaggio di grana (‘grana’ means ‘grainy’), and soon enough it was being made and enjoyed across the whole of northern Italy.
This is how things were until right up to the 1950s – independent cheesemakers across northern Italy making their own versions of formaggio di grana for their local communities. But in 1951, dairy owners came together to form a consortium, agreeing certain rules about cheesemaking and the characteristics of certain styles. By 1955, formaggio di grana was known as Grana Padano (Padano referred to the Po Valley, also known as Valle Padana) and was made to strict guidelines set out by The Consortium for the Protection of Grana Padano Cheese (CTFGP). This body has been responsible for ensuring the consistency of this cheese ever since, and in 1996 successfully achieved PDO-protected status from the EU for Grana Padano.
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Grana Padano: Italy’s big cheese