Typical Products: Cheeses
Squacquerone Cheese of Romagna
The "Squacquerone di Romagna" (Squaquaron) is a cheese with ancient origins and often eaten with the piadina flat bread. It is closely linked to the rural environment, where it was a habit to produce and consume it during winter.
It is produced in an area that includes the whole Romagna Apennine. Its main features are those of being a very soft cheese, round in shape, without rind, and with a taste that particularly recalls the pleasant sour milk. It is similar to the stracchino or crescenza cheeses but it has a more liquid consistency (it is actually composed of 60% of water).
The absence of rind and its pearly colour are the key features of this product. This cheese requires a short maturation period, from 1 to 4 days.
Some people say that its name comes from the happy sound of the peasant laugh, but according to others, it derives from the dialect word "squaquaron", meaning the sound of things that melt and indicating the high "wateriness" of this very soft cheese that tends to take the shape of the object in which is contained.
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Raviggiolo
The Raviggiolo is a delicious soft cheese to be eaten fresh. This product is symbolic of Central Apennines, between Romagna and Tuscany, even though the legend says that the first production occurred in Santa Sofia, on the slopes of the Tuscan-Romagnolo Apennine.
The cheese is made from cow's raw milk and the inner part is white and tender. Its taste is very delicate, almost sweet, slightly buttery and without rind. It is produced between October and March, at home and therefore in a limited quantity, by adding rennet to whole milk freshly taken from the cow, putting it to drain, without breaking the curd, for one night on fern, fig or cabbage leaves, into a wicker basket.
Normally, it has a circular shape (the molds are known as "Casine") and a height ranging between 2 and 4 cm. In ancient times, it was made from goat’s milk or a mixture of sheep and goat’s milk. No maturation period is required and it is usually presented on well-washed fern branches collected far from the streets. This delicious cheese is only dressed with oil, salt and pepper. It is quoted by Pellegrino Artusi in his "The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well" (1894) as an ingredient for the stuffing of cappelletti pasta.
Foreste Casentinesi, Mount Falterona and Campigna National Park
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Pit-aged cheese
The "Fossa" (pit) is a local and typical product obtained from the fermentation, in seasoning pits, of the classic cheese produced in the area comprised between the valleys of Rubicone and Marecchia Rivers, at the border of Romagna and Marche.
Sogliano al Rubicone is the Romagna capital of the "Fossa" and dedicates to this delicious product, PDO since 2007, a famous fair taking place between November and December.
The custom to "bury" the cheese has been passed on over the centuries as an integral part of the local peasant tradition. The origins of this practice are unknown, even though documents dating back to the XV century testify that it existed at that time.
The cheese must be previously locked up in cloth bags, preferably white, on which the owners of the pits will put two numbers, with cooked oil and smoke-black: the first one corresponds to the owner, the second one to the weight, still traditionally expressed in pounds. The aging pits are nothing else than underground areas, probably of Middle Ages origins, excavated into the tuff of the town of Sogliano and once used for grain storage. They can hold up to 100 tons of cheese.
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"La Solfara" Cave cheese
Predappio Alta is a small group of houses clinging to a rocky spur, simply called "la prè", or the stone, which is famous for the numerous tunnels dug into the mountain and which were used to represent one of the largest solfataras of Romagna.
A unique and very rare product comes from the caves of this ancient mine: "La Solfara" cave cheese.
The Pecorino cheese coming from the hills of Siena is used to produce it, and more precisely, the Pecorino of Pienza, a spring production, which is matured for 2 months in the Solfatara caves of Predappio Alta. The dampness and the specific sulphur structure of the caves make this cheese creamy and strong, with a unique and delicate taste. The cheeses are placed into the fresh and damp caves (about 12 constant degrees) in mid-August, in a gorge of the mine near the sulphur lake.
"La Solfara" is produced in limited quantity because the space available for the maturing in the caves is small. A few lucky experts can taste and buy it in November, during the Vine-dresser Festival of Predappio Alta or at Christmas, during the events linked to the preparation of the crib into the Salfonara Caves.
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