- [Kelly] How do I try and cover the breadth of traditional cheese making in Italy and Spain?

(laughing) It's a mad dash on planes, trains, automobiles, and a boat.

- Partner in crime Michelle talked us, talked us into a train, otherwise we would have missed it.

- To uncover buffalo, cow, sheep, and goat milk cheeses.

(cowbells jingling) (chill music) I am here in beautiful Bergamo, Italy at Quattro Portoni and we're going to learn about buffalo bleu cheese and all sorts of buffalo cheese, but first, just look at the baby buffalo.

I feel like I am back home.

This is my childhood right here.

It was cows, not buffalo.

My skin, ah!

I'm getting tugged on!

- To learn how to make these cheeses, there was so much trial and error, so much throwing stuff out because, originally it was just gonna be a buffalo farm.

They were cattle herders and they were like, ah, we wanna do something different.

All the traditional recipes of the area, which was tallegio, whatever it was, it just didn't work with buffalo milk.

It's so much denser, you need to figure out the cooking time difference, the separation, it holds much more, the moisture.

So, look how big the curd is.

It's four times as big as the garochor curd or anything else because you want to keep all the moisture in it so that you have that pliability that's soft, and that creaminess.

The more that you want a more aged cheese, that curds gonna get smaller because it needs to be drier.

So, do you see?

Look how pliable it is.

This is the (mumbles).

- Oh, so it's part of the same family, it's fine.

- Yes, yes.

The master cheese makers have been here for 12 years and the other, 10.

So I said, my god, you were high school kids, no, elementary school kids, look how young they are!

Now, look.

Do you see how great that is?

- Yeah.

- It's translucent milk.

- Crazy.

- So it tastes like cow's milk.

It's more golden.

- [Kelly] So, the buffalo milk is gonna be-- - Translucent.

- A translucent green.

- Yeah.

- Sheep typically?

- Sheep typically is yellow.

- [Kelly] Yellow, cow, yellow.

Goat, white.

- Cow, golden, yeah.

Nobody in Italy, nobody really in the world, was making aged buffalo cheese.

What Brun and Alfio decided to do was absolutely 100% innovation.

'Cause there was always mozarella di bufala, and ricotta di bufala.

- Right, right, right.

- But to do something that was from semi-soft to firm, nobody had ever done it before.

- Oh my gosh, look at this beautiful, healthy cheese.

- Exactly.

- To an untrained eye, they'll be like, oh my God, it's all gone bad.

- Exactly.

- And then you smack them across the face and call them stupid!

- We have to celebrate the mold.

If you don't have mold on cheese, you're not gonna have good cheese.

But if mold starts growing, it's saying hi, I'm alive, I'm healthy.

Because I've been born in a humid area and in order for me to grow and be happy, I need to have that mold.

It's just something that is a natural part of the aging process of cheese.

And in different areas of where you make cheese, the teroir changes, and the different colors and types of molds come out.

So, there's a yellow mold that I find in Lombardian Piemonte that makes me really excited to see it.

It's beautiful and to me, that is just the teroir of those areas.

- [Kelly] Oh, is it weird that it smells so bright in here?

(speaking in foreign language) - This is the cheese I asked him to make.

- Porta?

- Porta Roca.

- Porta Roca.

- Porta Roca.

- He has cheeseS named after those archways when we went past Colonial City.

- [Kelly] Oh, they're beautiful.

- And it's so good, but it's so milky.

This room is just for these cheeses here, then he has different rooms for different types of cheeses.

- Okay.

The whole town is coming together tonight to celebrate these stellar cheeses and the community around it.

But we'll get to that.

Let's first take a step back in time on cheese making.

(singing in foreign language) Just walked up little mountains and laid in little wildflowers, and now suddenly I'm stirring polenta and (mumbles) in this house.

I'm meeting these amazing people, I'm learning their traditions, and I'm sweating and grunting and very happy.

I'm trying not to burn the polenta.

I have to keep stirring it to keep it from burning.

I don't know how good I'm doing, though.

Need more wine for this!

Ambrogio, maker of the famed taleggio cheese, I hope is gonna put me to work on the origins of cheese making.

Oh, I could have helped them do that!

After my failed polenta stirring, I'm not so sure.

(singing in foreign language) - [Woman] He's going to add the rennet.

The rennet is added, the curd cutting to form begins.

So, that's the first cut, the second cut.

- [Kelly] Oh, my gosh, I wanna learn this.

God, that is so meditative.

- Your turn.

- Grazie.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Woman] Hold it tightly.

(speaking in foreign language) - Shift your wrist.

- 'Kay, yeah, I just need a second to figure it out.

This is why I have to learn things by doing them.

Tell him, he's been doing this for a long time.

How many years?

(speaking in foreign language) - [Woman] I told him he's jealous because it took him 50 years to get it and you're getting it quicker.

- He's like, no.

I think I'm also holding it wrong.

Like, I want to do it with my left hand.

Grazie.

It's okay?

(speaking in foreign language) Oh, yeah, he's gonna keep.

Just like a man, not happy with the way a woman did it.

It's just always the way.

It's always the curds and whey.

- That was a cute one.

Very cute one.

I've had like 23 years of going back and forth with this man.

You know, to figure, a cheese this delicate out, to bring it well, when we used to just see it rot in people's cheese cases.

You know, you don't want to do it.

To figure out that it comes still soft and beautiful, not dried out on the crust, not too stinky, (mumbles).

Here, it's a whole manual process.

So, they have the cloth, which looks like burlap, and now they're going to manually separate the curds from the whey.

Like Little Miss Muffett.

- Copper vat, which you always make cheese in a copper vat.

Parmesan was made in a copper vat.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Woman] So, it's starting to get very solid.

So, this is going to stay like this, in the mold, for 48 hours.

- I can't believe how congealed and compact it is already.

It's so firm.

Boop, boop.

Just makes it seem like I could probably make cheese, but of course, this was the beginning, now it's gotten to be something a lot more developed and complicated with all that technical equipment.

We're gonna go explore that stuff, too.

(ethereal choir music) (laughing) - I'm really just speechless.

I don't know what, it's just too beautiful and incredible.

Of course, technical components have evolved over time, but tending to the mold remains the same.

I'm at the aging rooms for both Bruno's buffalo cheese we saw earlier, and Ambrogio's taleggio.

Did you make these?

(laughing) - Every week we have to turn and brush the cheeses.

Because in the top of the cheeses, we have the mold, the green, and the white mold.

I give you the gloves.

- Oh, you wanted me to work?

- Yes!

Why not?

Okay, wet the brush.

If you don't clean the cheeses, the taste of taleggio became very moldy, okay?

And if you don't turn the taleggio, all the protein go in the-- - Into the bottom?

- The bottom side.

- (whistles) Do you whistle?

What do you do while you do this all day?

Mauro, how long have you been doing this?

- When I was 13 or 14 years old I started to help my father and my mother in the summertime.

- It's just a little high for me, I'm short.

I got it, guys, I got it.

I know, I'm just one behind, sorry.

I'm new at this.

- This is one of your cheeses, okay.

In your side.

(laughing) - I just gotta do a quality check.

- Okay.

- I believe you.

Wait, should I go over here and do it at the same time?

- [Mauro] Take the paper.

Okay.

- You guys really do this all by hand?

- All by hand.

- How many cheeses do you wrap a week?

- 10,000 taleggio.

- 10,000 taleggio wrapped in one week?

- In one week, not in three minutes.

(laughing) - What?

- [Mauro] Sign your taleggio.

- Maybe I actually want you guys to sign it.

I mean, this is really your work.

I'm kinda getting in the way.

Michele's gotta come, too!

(mumbles) (laughing) (tribal music) (train rumbling) So, in order to see all these places, it means we're doing planes, trains, and automobiles.

Somehow our amazing partner in crime, Michele, talked us into a train, otherwise we would have missed it, and we would have, I don't know, maybe not seen what we were about to see.

But it's happening anyway, so.

And we're backing up footage in the meantime.

'Cause that's how we do, that's how we do.

(laughing) (lively choir music) The evolution of cheese making continues in Oderzo, just outside of Venice, with the Moro family.

(lively choir music) They age their cow's milk 90 days before creating a grain sized curd.

Then it's pressed old-school style before a few days rest in their salt brine.

Since 1930, though, the family have continued the most clever and delicious tradition in cheese.

Come on!

- [Giovani] Iberico with a amarone grapes.

- Amarone grapes.

- Yeah, because we don't do-- - What?

- The drunken cheese only with the wine, but with the grapes.

- [Kelly] You're telling me there's cheese in here?

- Yeah, and the amarone is the most famous wine red in Italy.

- This is a tradition that's been in Veneto for many years.

The story is that they were pirates, (mumbles) pirates, when they came to do raids in the Veneto region, farmers took their cheese and hid it in the wine and the wine must until they left, so that they wouldn't find it.

And when they pulled the cheese out, they found that they had this new type of cheese.

And that it preserved the cheese.

- [Kelly] So, Giovani, you're studying from your dad to be a cheese maker?

- [Giovani] Yeah.

(grunts) (laughing) - Seriously?

So, what's in these bad boys?

- In this box, we have some latteria al tartufo.

- Soto?

(speaking in foreign language) - It is a cheese aging in the ashes.

Two or three months.

This is ash.

- How do you guys make the ash?

What's it from?

- Is ash from fajo, that is a tree.

- Oh, really?

- Really.

- [Woman] It's a way of preserving the cheese-- - And also to give the cheese a little smoked flavor.

- Oh, a little smoke, a little flavor?

- And the ashes mixed with secret ingredients, which became part of it's cult flavoring.

He said they have so many spices, and different herbs and different things here because Venice was where all the ships came in and brought all the spices from all around.

- [Kelly] Ah!

- They were the first to import all these spices from the Middle East, and the Orient, and everything else.

So, that's why they have so much of this tradition.

- I love the connection to the history, too.

And everything.

I guess this makes sense why you wanna get into cheese making, Giovani.

- I like this, to do this type of refinery, that type of tradition, and it is cool that young people continue to do this.

- Yeah.

(grunts) (laughing) Next?

- Keep going.

Just dump it all in, girl.

- Just a little bit.

- Empty the sack.

- [Kelly] Giovani, what's this?

- [Giovani] This is cheese made with prosecco.

- [Kelly] This is cheese made with prosecco?

- Yeah.

- Oh, I want that.

So it's sitting in a big thing of bubbly prosecco?

I assume it's really good prosecco because I feel like you guys would know good prosecco versus bad prosecco.

Bad prosecco, couldn't get any worse.

Seriously, I want this family to adopt me.

They also have a beautiful shop filled to the brim with the best curated ingredients of the region.

Real prosecco, cheese aged in rose petals.

Mom, if you're listening, let's quit everything and move in with this charming bunch.

And this has a lot of the qualities that I like in a gruyere.

And alpines (mumbles) yeah, I'm out of cheese.

(singing in foreign language) - Nice color.

- Salute!

On the next The Original Fare, flight delays!

Then more Spain and Italy on part two of these very special and super tasty cheese episodes.