Last Labor Day, my family and I had a BBQ, and I was tasked with making a cheese plate. My aunt and I had visited the California Cheese Train, and had picked up some tasty specimens, leading me to create this tasteful display.
On the blog, we've done various venerations thus far. Beef. Pork. Canned food. Spirits. Well, after spending some fun times with my new friends on the Cheese trail, I figured it might be nice to devote some lines to my favorite--yes, favorite--protein: cheese.
When I was in Rome, just before the long walk between the Vatican Museum and the Colosseum, I had just enough time to grab a quick pasta in a little hole in the wall. They cooked up a mound of fresh egg pasta, tossed it with some fresh pepper and pecorino romano, and put it in a cardboard cone. Who ever said pasta couldn't be portable?
Anyway, this simple preparation is a Roman classic, known as cacio e pepe. It literally means "cheese and pepper". "Cacio" refers to pecorino romano in the Roman dialect, a Sheep's milk cheese that has been around for centuries. It's tangy and salty and dry, but melts perfectly. The precise history of the dish is a tad unclear, but it seems to have a similar lineage to that of pasta alla gricia--and thus, pasta alla carbonara. It was an ideal road trip food, circa first millennium: a chunk of spoilage-resistant cheese, some dried pasta, water, and a few peppercorns. If you're a shepherd, toss the ingredients together over the campfire and steel yourself against the chilly Appenine evening.
Cacio e pepe is easy. Shred pecorino cheese with a little olive oil. Add a half a cup of starchy pasta water. Stir like mad until the cheese melts. Toss with pasta. Voila. It’s good science and good eating.
As delicious as cacio e pepe is, we need not settle for simplicity these days. We have dozens of delicious cheeses to deal with, especially if we have leftovers from a Labor Day BBQ. But just because we have a bunch of cheeses doesn't mean we can just dump them onto pasta. We're going to leave the simplicity of cacio e pepe behind. This means both an uptick in flavor profile, but also a concomitant increase in chemical complexity. Quattro formaggi it is.
One may recognize quattro formaggi as either a type of pizza or pasta preparation. It’s nothing special—it just means “four cheese”. I don’t have any particularly special history on the style—one site online suggested it emerged in the 1970s—to which I say, sure. The historical part is not of critical import in this post. Rather, I hope that the anthropological and the biochemical will inform you, fair reader, fully and will make quattro (or multi) formaggi your favorite non-recipe around.
If any of you have attempted to make an ad hoc Mac and Cheese before by melting cheddar on cooked noodles, you know the profound disappointment that results. Beads of coagulated cheese proteins in a web of slippery noodles. If we're going to make a creamy, salty, silky sauce, with more cheeses, we need science.
So first question: What is cheese? How do we best cook with it?
Cheese it thought to have originated in the prehistoric period, perhaps around 8000BC, just when the domestication of dairy-producing critters was getting underway. Shepherds milking their sheep and goats needed a way to hold their milk before consumption. Like modern-day Canadians, they figured the best way to transport their milk was in a bag. And given that plastic would have been a hot commodity indeed in prehistoric times, they used the baggiest thing they had available to them: a sheep's stomach. In went the milk, and then the shepherd began his long walk back to the ranch. When he opened the stomach again, to ladle out a drink, he must have gotten quite the surprise. The bag now did not merely contain a watery, green-hued liquid, but it also contained clumps of solid. He scratched his head and said "What the hell happened here?"
Our prehistoric shepherd must have missed his biochemistry lessons, as he was unaware that stomachs are acidic environments that contain digestive enzymes responsible for protein decomposition. We better thank him for error. When he put the milk in the sac, the enzymes went to work digesting the milk. The proteins are normally configured to float freely and cleanly within the water that constitutes the vast majority of milk in units called micelles. The ends of these micelles got clipped and the resulting free chains got agglutinated in clumps, precipitating out of the aqueous phase of the milk.
Today, we call those enzymes "rennet," those chunks "curds," and the leftover liquid, "whey."
Milk contains a protein called casein. As it exists in milk, it is in a salt form with positively charged calcium. When we shock cheese, either by adding acid, as is the case in the production of Indian paneer or Mexican queso fresco, making fragile, crumbly curds. If we are to add rennet, we get longer protein chains which can be stretched into cheeses like mozzarella or cheddar. If we’re feeling fancy, we can add bacteria and set the cheese out to mature for a while, yielding blue cheese, brie, or Parmesan. Make sense?
Now with that lesson in dairy-culture resolved, we can get down to fun part of discussing the aesthetic pleasures of cheesy pasta. How do we make cheeses the cheesiest possible?
From a chemical perspective, we could take the Blue-Box approach. This would involve adding citrate to the mix. You know how when you get nacho cheese at a sporting event, it’s soft and runny and hardly recognizable as cheese? Or how American cheese melts so smoothly, without clumps? That’s the citrate. Citrate is a chelator of calcium, which is to say it acts as a chemical sink for calcium. Without calcium to form complexes with free-floating protein chains, you never get that clumping, clotting of cheese as it cools. It always remains a fluid.
You can buy citrate online if this approach appeals to you. I personally don’t love the texture of the resultant fluid, so would favor a different way.
As far as I’m concerned, the magic of any deployment of multi formaggi–whether in pizza or pasta form—is in making sure that each cheese's unique flavor and chemistry does not get drowned out by the others. We're looking for teamwork. Like a football team in which Lineman block for Quarterbacks, your pasta ai quattro formaggi will have a place for every talent.
Pasta ai multi-Formaggi
For your tasteful tetrology, you'll want the following:
One tangy cheese--gorgonzola [any blue cheese, goat cheese]
One "melting" cheese--provolone, scamorza, [cheddar, chihuahua, Muenster, gruyere]
One hard cheese--parmesan, pecorino romano, grana padano
One creamy cheese--mascarpone, taleggio, fontina, ricotta, [Camembert, brie, ~cream cheese~]
One tablespoon heavy cream
One clove of garlic, minced
1/2 pound fettuccine or other ribbon-shaped pasta
Fresh parsley, black pepper, and red pepper flake to taste
As part of the multi-formaggi experience, we will have to contend with some unique cheese creatures. Some are firm, some are soft. Some melt creamily, some get gooey. Some are very potent, others play softly. Let's bring them together.
You will not want to use any acid-made cheeses, as they generally don't melt at all--these would be cheeses like feta, queso fresco, paneer, halloumi.
So what do I have in my fridge right now?
Okay, so it looks like I have a nice distribution: fontina, due to its high fat content, melts like a creamy champ. Provolone makes longer chains when it melts, so it’s nice for that cheesy chew, and has a note of smoky. Parm and Pecorino, you’ve met before. Gorgonzola has a pleasant tang, when used to taste. And of course, cream cheese is what I had as an additional fat matrix to dissolve all this in. You don’t like Philadelphia? You can use mascarpone.
First, put some water on to boil. Use a little less water than you normally would. Now get grating. Get all that cheese broken down. Done? Now, we’re ready. Add it all to a pan. All 7-8 ounces of cheese, the tablespoon of cream, the red pepper, and the minced garlic. It’ll look like this:
Put medium-low heat underneath. Slowly, but surely, they’ll all come together. What we’re doing is creating a solution in which protein is dissolved in fat. Finish with parsley. It sure is unctuous:
The strands are a critical element, imo.
Now, attend to the pasta. Take out a tablespoon or two of pasta water and add it to the sauce. Drain the noodles, dump it in the sauce, and toss like mad.
Remember when I said to use less water than usual? I want as much starch as possible to remain on the noodles. The starch acts as an emulsifier, which means that the water on the noodles and the fat of our cheesy fondutta with come together as a harmonious whole. As I stated above, this is the entire basis for the formation of the sauce in cacio e pepe. Here, the creamy cheeses act as a superior fatty substrate to the hard romano cheese, so it’s not as critical to have pasta water on board. But a splash won’t hurt, would it?
You want to be chefy? How about adding some truffle oil, or if you’re feeling decadent, some shaved truffle to the top? Eager for that plasticine flow of whizz? Give the citrate approach a try.
I hope I’ve shown that multi-formaggi is animated less by a follow-the-rules approach, than by a feeling in your heart. It’s that warm, gooey feeling you get when you eat a lot of cheese. Your cooking skills will be in high demand as fall arrives.