Composition of Grana Padano cheese, its beneficial properties, calorie content and contraindications for use. How is the product eaten and what are the recipes with its participation that you can whip up at home?
Grana Padano cheese is a healthy product with a pleasant salty taste and nutty notes. Refers to hard varieties of Italian cheeses. It is used as an independent product or an integral component for preparing salads, snacks and desserts. Grana Padano is ideal for preparing almost any dish containing hard cheese.
Features of the preparation of Grana Padano cheese
About how to cook Grana Padano cheese, Italian chefs learned about 1000 AD. Since then, the rules for making the product have practically not changed, in contrast to the equipment - thanks to modern technologies, many stages of cheese preparation have become automated.
Modern Grana Padano, as before, is produced mainly in the Italian provinces, however, according to strict and officially regulated requirements. Cheese makers carefully monitor not only the quality of the product preparation process, but also the characteristics of raw materials (milk) and even the process of feeding dairy cows.
Grana Padano is cooked in huge cauldrons, the walls of which are made of copper or are covered with this material from the inside. In shape, such cauldrons resemble a bell in an inverted position. The volume of the vessel is 1000 liters. So, the production of 1 kg of cheese takes about 15 liters of milk. From such a vat, specialists get two heads of Gran Padano - which is why 2 servings of this cheese are usually called twins.
Grana Padano cheese recipe:
- Heating milk to a certain degree.
- Adding rennet (which is obtained in a special way from calves) and whey left over from the cooks after the preparation of the previous batch of Gran Padano.
- Waiting for milk to clot.
- Cutting the resulting curd of cheese and stirring its pieces.
- Waiting for the solid particles of cheese to completely settle to the bottom of the boiler.
- Raising from the bottom and cutting the resulting clot into two parts.
- Placing cheese in wooden molds for a day (modern manufacturers often use Teflon counterparts); marking it with the help of special plates inserted into wooden molds; adding casein, which contributes to the formation of the characteristic cheese crust.
- Placing the cheese in a steel mold with perforated walls for a few days to give it its final shape.
- Placing the product in the brine for a specified period of time, which can last up to 25 days.
- Drying Gran Padano in special rooms.
- Placement of cheese in special ventilated rooms for maturation, which lasts from 9 to 24 months. During ripening, the cheese is turned upside down and rubbed with a special solution every 2 weeks. Thanks to modern technology, this process is fully automated.
- Checking the quality of already ripe cheese and applying a special brand on its head with the name "Grana Padano".
Interesting! Cheese cannot be sold under the name Grana Padano if it is not branded accordingly.
