Grana Padano

    Well-known in Italy, Grana Padano is starting to show up in American recipes.
    “It tastes like a parmesan; it’s like a poor-man’s parmesan,” said Danielle Anderson, floor manager and cheese buyer at The Corkscrew wine and cheese store in Springfield, Ill. “It’s not as complicated, not as strong, not as aged as parmesan, but it’s really good. It starts out milky and nutty and then tastes like a mouthful of butter.”
    The cow's milk cheese — which has a sweet, delicate flavor — can be served as an accompaniment to wine or fruit; crumbled in pieces alongside a stew; shredded over salads; and grated over soup, pasta or risotto. Anderson suggests shaving it onto a salad or vegetables, serving it with crackers or putting a bit of it on a grilled-cheese sandwich.
    The cheese was discovered a thousand years ago, according to www.granapadano.com. Cistercian monks in northern Italy’s fertile Po Valley devised a preservation process — which involved heating milk in large copper vats and then pressing it into round wooden molds — that produced the hard cheese.
Grana Padano is a Protected Designation of Origin (P.D.O.) cheese. That means the European Union makes sure products are genuinely originated from a certain region and follow a certain standard of production. The Consorzio Tutela Grana Padano, a consortium of producers, maturers and retailers, supervises the production of Grana Padano.
Contact Kathryn Rem at kathryn.rem@sj-r.com.