#mixed milk

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Sola Tre Latte, affinaged and exported by Castagna Formaggi,gets its name from the word, in Piedmontese dialect, for the sole of the shoe, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the distinctive aromas which develop in the cave as it ages. Similar to the traditional Italian cheese Raschera, the Sola differs in that it is made with a mix of three milks: cow, sheep and goat (Tre Latte translates to "three milks"). The Italians are the masters of mixed milk cheeses — the many varieties of Robiola being perhaps the best example — and Sola is another cheese that marries the qualities of multiple milks in one wheel. Located in Verbano-Cusio-Ossola, in Piedmont, Italy, Joseph Castagna and his family have 40 years of experience working with the producers and cheeses of their region and throughout Italy.

The Sola comes in a pudgy square format, with an amber exterior speckled with patches of gray-blue and white mold. Cutting into it reveals a dense ivory paste with scattered eyes, softening to an elastic texture as it warms. The flavor is mild but complex, tangy, nutty, meaty, a bit sour, with a deep earthy overtone, particularly at the rind. The aromas are of wet stone, hay, and musty caves. 

Purchased at Formaggio Essex.

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Montebore, produced by Cooperativa Vallenostra in the Alessandria Province of Italy, earns its nickname, the "wedding cake cheese", from its unusual tiered format, multiple layers of ever smaller dimensions stacked on top of each other to create the distinctive stepping shape (You can see more photos at this Slow Food Facebook page).

Legend has it that the Montebore was born in 1489, when it was presented at the wedding banquet of Isabella D'Aragona and Gian Galeazzo Sforza, the son of the Duke of Milan. The celebration was apparently quite opulent and included none other than Leonardo da Vinci as the Master of Ceremonies, but only one cheese, the Montebore, was served. 

The Montebore remained in production for many centuries afterwards, but after World War II, with the migration of farmers out of the remote valleys to the cities, and the industrialization of the cheese industry, Montebore fell out of production with hardly anyone noticing, and threatened to go extinct entirely once the last former producer, Carolina Bracco, had passed away. In 1999 however, Maurizio Fava, of the local Slow Food Presidium, and Roberto Grattone, a young cheesemaker, tracked her down, and convinced her to teach them how to make the cheese. Roberto, with the help of Agata Marchesotti, are now producing Montebore in sufficient quantities for it to be exported beyond Italy's borders, and this distinctive cheese has come back from the edge. 

Made with 70% cow and 30% sheep's milk, the curds are moulded in multiple diameters, and then assembled when they come out of the moulds into the 3 (and sometimes more) layers and washed with brine, before being aged for up to two months. As the cheese ages and the rind develops, the layers merge, so that by the time the cheese is sliced into, the only evidence of the stacking is the outer shape, as the interior paste merges into one. 

The rind of the Montebore is white over amber and gray, lightly wrinkled. The paste is moist, spongy and dense with a scattering of eyes and fissures, oozing at the creamline. The flavor is milky, salty and pleasantly sour, a bit yeasty, with mushroomy and nutty notes. 

Purchased at Formaggio Essex. 

If you speak Italian, check out this video from the 2013 Cheese Biennial in Bra, Italy, featuring Roberto Grattone.

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Over at Serious Eats, Stephanie Stiavetti (@sstiavetti) talks up mixed-milk cheeses, and makes some great recommendations for mixers to try, including Vermont Creamery Cremont, Rogue Creamery Echo Mountain, Doe Run Creamery's Hummingbird, and Onetik Chebris:

If you're intimately familiar with cheese, then you're no doubt versed in the differences between sheep, cow, and goat's milk. Each kind of milk has its own individual personality traits, bringing unique contributions to the cheese world by way of flavor, texture, and aroma.

While we Disciples of the Curd know and love our single-milk cheeses, how familiar are you with those created in blending the milks of different animals? By combining different kinds of milk, cheesemakers open the door to a whole new world of texture and flavor, with varieties that are infinitely complex in all the areas we relish when savoring cheese.

Below are a few of my favorite mixed-milk cheeses. Of course these are but a few that you'll find at your local cheese shop; I'm hoping that you'll use these as a jumping-off point to dig deeper into mixed milk love.

Check out the full list. 

(Photos ©2013 SeriousEats.com)

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Cravanzina, made by Caseificio dell'Alta Langa, hails from the Alta Langa region of Southern Piedmont. Caseificio dell'Alta Langa produces a variety of cheeses with a particular talent for Robiola's, including the Robiola Bosina. The Cravanzina, like many Robiola's, is a mixed-milk cheese, made with sheep and cow's milk and is a relatively new invention inspired by Paglierina, a traditional Alta Langa cheese, whose name derives from their aging on straw, or "paglia". 

The wheel is soft and giving to the touch, with a delicate, impressively thin rind, a veil of white over the exterior. The paste is ivory-yellow and lightly eyed, oozing and bulging as it warms. The aroma is light and milky with fungal notes, and in flavor this is a very mild, buttery, easy-eating cheese. This is not to say it's boring however; it has a wonderful creaminess and silky mouthfeel, with mushroomy, earthy flavors and hints of hay and buttermilk. An excellent cheese for early in the wheel of your cheese plate. 

Purchased at Olde Hudson. 

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Sometimes, the cheese comes out great. And sometimes...not so much. Exhibit A: My latest batch of a "Robiola" style cheese, based on the recipe from Artisan Cheesemaking at Home. 

The rind of the cheese has the trademark geotrichum brainy wrinkles to it, as well as the orange-pink hue common to Robiolas, so from the outside it didn't look so bad. But if you've ever had a Robiola (and there are actually quite a few different varieties so I shouldn't be using it as a blanket term, but imagine a Robiola Bosina and you can see what I was hoping for), you'll know that it is generally soft and bordering on custardy on the inside, similar in texture to a Taleggio. Indeed, the recipe said that at 3-4 weeks it would be "very ripe, and barely contained by the thin rind". Sadly, as I suspected as I inspected the wheels during their daily turns and gave them a light squeeze with my fingers, the inside just never went soft, maintaining a hard consistency even as the rind ripened and wrinkled around it. I inserted a tryer at 3 weeks (you can see the scars from that running through the middle) and had my fears confirmed, but kept the wheel in the fridge for a while longer, in the hopes that additional time would engender the desired transformation. 

As the pictures show, however, there was no such magical change. On cutting the wheel open, I found a thin layer of custardy paste just under the rind, but beyond that it was hard and chalky, and not in a good way. the rind and creamline layer didn't taste bad actually, but the hard interior was bland and sour.  As the pictures show, there was also some wicked slip-skin. Needless to say, these wheels went in the trash.  

So what went wrong? hard to know. The milk used was 50/50 Raw Cow/Pasteurized Goat, and I'm not sure if mixing raw and pasteurized might produced unexpected results. The recipe was for all pasteurized, so the raw milk could have thrown it off. I cut back on the Calcium Chloride called for in the recipe but perhaps should have left it out altogether. 

The wheel was also taller than expected. The recipe called for a full-sized camembert mold but I had two smaller, so it's possible the cheese ended up too thick height-wise for the salt to penetrate or for it to ripen properly. 

Finally, the humidity could have been too low. I went with the leaf-wrapped variety of the recipe, substituting cheese paper for cabbage leafs, because it called for 80% humidity rather than 92-95%, but its possible that there just wasnt enough moisture in the environment for these wheels. 

So, live and learn, and hopefully produce a better Robiola next time! (And just to be clear, I dont blame the recipe. Other recipes from the same book have turned out well so it's a safe bet it's user error in this case.)