Pizzoccheri
Le Alpi
One of the most beautiful regions of Italy, in my opinion, is Lombardy, situated in the very north of the country and home to Milan, Lake Como, and the Orobic Alps. Like other northern regions, its food varies primarily from that of the south due to topography and climate. In these mountains where the land sees quite a bit of rain and snow, tomatoes and eggplant are not as prevalent as root vegetables and cabbage. Grain grown for pasta throughout the southern parts of Italy gives way to corn （both yellow and white, used to make polenta）， rice （for risotto）， and buckwheat. It is with the latter that one of my favorite dishes ever is made, the traditional Lombard recipe known as pizzoccheri.
Pizzoccheri is a noodle composed of approximately 50 percent buckwheat flour and 50 percent wheat flour, about the length and width of pappardelle but a bit thicker and more dense. It is served during the autumn and winter months in a kind of casserole called pappardelle alla Valtellina. Valtellina. The name sounds like that of an imagined zaftig wood sprite from a Fellini film. Good God, what a gorgeous chunk of Alpine cheese is Valtellina. Its soft and gentle creaminess when melted just wraps itself around—
Off to take a cold shower.
I’m back.
Anyway, pizzoccheri, like most Italian food, comes from humble beginnings and has a rightful place in the canon of Cucina Povera. Using very few ingredients, it creates an extremely rich and hearty dish. After a winter’s day outdoors in the Alps, like raclette or venison stew, it is exactly what a body wants and needs. But there is one more key ingredient that elevates this dish, another cheese, called Bitto.
In the tiniest of tiny Italian mountain towns, Gerola Alta, Paolo Ciapparelli is carrying on the age-old tradition of making this historic cheese. Bitto is made from the milk of cows that graze on the Alpine mountain flora. Since the pastures are at different altitudes and receive differing amounts of sun and moisture, the flora vary, and they each impart their particular flavors to the cow’s milk. Bitto has been made this way for centuries, yet new EU regulations, which are often at odds with traditional methods, have allowed the cheese-making process to omit crucial steps and add new ones, therefore altering its true character and taste. For this reason, with the support of the Slow Food movement, Paolo has chosen to continue making Bitto the old way, calling it Bitto Storico （Historic Bitto） or Bitto Ribelle （Rebel Bitto）。
Historic Bitto is made with the addition of about 10 percent indigenous Orobic goat’s milk. The addition of goat’s milk allows the cheese to be aged for an extraordinary amount of time, usually for about five to twelve years but sometimes up to eighteen years. This is unheard of in the world of cheese making. The depth of flavor this amount of aging imparts is the reason it is the most expensive cheese in the world, selling for over six thousand dollars for a twenty-kilo wheel.
Visiting Paolo’s casera （cheese cellar） is basically like entering a museum of aroma. The rich, deep, complex smells coming from a thousand wheels of cheese caused even my nostrils and my eyes to salivate. It was almost overwhelming. As I was about to rip open a wheel with my bare hands and gnaw my way through it, I noticed that Paolo had laid out three cheeses of various ages for me to taste, along with some local wines, hence saving me from an embarrassingly feral public episode. The differences between them were distinct, the oldest cheese being the most dry and most potent, the youngest slightly softer, and the cheese aged for a certain amount of time between the two tasted unsurprisingly like a bit of both. This is the same experience one might have when tasting Parmigiano in varying states of age. However, each morsel of the triad of Bitto had an extraordinary complexity and depth of flavor that I had never tasted in a cheese before. I cannot explain it other than to say it was exactly the sum of its parts and then some: mountains, rain, snow, cows, goats, grass, and time. Although I know that Parmigiano is known as the “King of Cheeses,” on a blustery day in a cellar in Gerola Alta in the Orobic Alps, according to this palate, that milky throne was usurped by tiny fragments of three ancient wheels of Bitto.
After visiting Paolo that day in his subterranean lactic lair, I went to a small stone cottage farther up in the mountains where I had promised to make pizzoccheri for the crew using a hunk of Bitto gifted by Paolo. As we made our way up to the cottage, I began to panic. What the fuck was I thinking? I had only made the dish a couple of times before and it had never quite turned out the way I had hoped. （I had eaten it for the first time at Riva, a London restaurant run by Andrea Riva, who hails from Lombardy, where it is made to perfection, hence my obsession.） As my panic was peaking we arrived at this gorgeous but tiny stone cottage that had been in the same family for generations. Once a barn for animals, it had been renovated into a charming weekend retreat. We were greeted by the owners, three generations of them: the grandfather, in his eighties, his daughter, and her teenage children. Suddenly I realized I was not only making pizzoccheri for the crew （who had no idea what it was supposed to taste like and were always starving, so I could easily get away with a mediocre version）， but I was to prepare it for the family as well, all of whom were Lombards and knew this dish better than anyone in the world. Especially the octogenarian patriarch!