The cheese fair in Bra
Every two years, the old market town of Bra in Piemonte, northern Italy – a short train ride from Turin and hard by the truffle capital in Alba – becomes a focal point for those who buy, sell and love cheese. Cheese-makers from all over Europe bring their knowledge and products to the streets of Bra, where under canopies they set up their stalls and meet the curious public. The cheese fair, which is organised by the Slow Food movement, is held at the end of September.
With each successive edition – this year’s was the sixth – Cheese has built up a high-profile reputation on the international calendar of cheese events. It has become important for producers, buyers, enthusiasts and food writers. This year’s edition put forward the greatest variety of international cheeses yet, from British cheddar to little-known cheeses from eastern Europe. Bulgaria was represented by a cheese made from the milk of the Rhodope cow, aged for four to five months in casks made of juniper wood, in the Arda valley. Meeting people at the fair were a group of Karakachan herders, who make cheese from the milk of Europe’s oldest breed of sheep, and store it in sheepskin. Transhumant herders from Romania gave tastings of their Branza de Burduf cheese, traditionally made from sheep’s milk in the southern Carpathians and stored in the bark of pine trees. The attraction from Bosnia was a large cheese aged in sheepskin, and Poland exhibited ‘oscypek’, a cheese made by shepherds in the Tatra Mountains.
Visitors discovered little-known cheeses like ‘geitost’ from Norway, which is intriguingly brown and sweet. There were also famous cheeses, like Dutch gouda.
Bra is one of the four founder-members of the international Slow Cities organisation, which is an offshoot of the Slow Food movement. The other three are Greve in Chianti, Orvieto and Positano. It produces two PDO cheeses of its own – hard and soft Bra.
The Cheese Fair began 10 years ago with a small selection of local and regional cheese-makers from northern Italy. There were plenty of mountain cheeses and many huge wheels of Parmiggiano Reggiano. Bra was chosen as the location because of its historic role as a market town in which cheeses were sold and bartered by mountain shepherds, goatherds and cowherds in exchange for the goods they needed. Bra is close to the foothills of the Alps, and milk and milk products are staple food products there, with butter used in cooking rather than olive oil. There is a great variety of cheeses made by small specialist producers.
For four festive days during which hundreds of thousands of visitors flocked to the town, Bra was given over to cheese and cheese-related events. Under the historic porticos of Corso Garibaldi, PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) cheeses were displayed. All of them were from the Alpine mountain areas of Italy, France and Switzerland – including the popular fontina from Italy and Gruyere from Switzerland, the well-known Beaufort from the French Alps, and lesser known types like formai de mut from the Italian Alps and reblochon from the French Alps. Other display areas showcased unusual and rare cheeses of high quality, produced in small quantities or in far-off lands, and certainly not the sort you might find at your local delicatessen counter. The House of Blue Cheeses brought together around 70 blue cheeses from Europe, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. Out on Piazza Carlo Alberto, the Great Cheese Market was in full swing, with a vast range of cheeses from Italy, Britain, France, Switzerland and Spain.
The Slow Food movement supports the use of raw milk as an essential ingredient in authentic and flavoursome cheese. It campaigns for the use of raw milk, rather than pasteurised milk, in cheese-making, accepting that industrially-made cheese cannot do without pasteurisation. Yet it claims that institutions in “English-speaking countries” have an approach that is far too “hyper-hygienic and technological” in insisting that pasteurisation is the only way to make a safe cheese. “This just ensures that there is uniformity of flavour,” the movement says. “Everyone now agrees that the great cheeses are those made with raw milk.”
Bolona, an African goats’-milk cheese, made on the island of Santo Antao in Cape Verde, was showcased as an example of cheese-making in an extreme environment. Shepherds on the remote Planalto Norte in Santo Antao – which is up to 1500m above sea level – have overcome the enormous difficulties of raising goats and making cheese. They are careful with water, plan the reproduction of animals, and use hygienic processing methods. Slow Food describes the cheese as being of outstanding quality. Bolona is a semi-hard pressed cheese made with rennet coagulation, in cylindrical shapes. It is ivory-coloured, with no rind or skin.