Composition, calorie content, peculiarities of making Italian Bra cheese. What benefits can the body bring, what is its potential harm? Serve on a cheese platter and use in cooking.
Bra is a semi-hard Italian cheese made from cow's milk, but the recipe allows some goat or sheep's milk to be added. The product got its name in honor of the Italian town of the same name, which was previously the center of the cheese trade - the province of Cuneo, however, in this town, cheese was never produced, only sales were carried out in it. The sconce head has a diameter of about 40 cm, a height of 9 cm, and a weight of 8 kg. The type and taste is determined by the ripening period. Crust: gray-white and elastic in young varieties, dark beige and dense in mature varieties. As it ripens, the pulp changes from white-beige to deep yellow, and the taste - from sweetish-tender to spicy and bright.
Features of making cheese Bra
At the moment, there are two main varieties - Bra Tenero and Bra Duro. Both are prepared from partially skimmed cow's milk, collected from one or two milkings, with a small addition of sheep and goat milk.
Bra Tenero is a softer cheese, it is heated up to 36-38 ° С, Bra Duro is harder - up to 27-32 ° С. Next, the milk is curdled with the help of ferments, the resulting mass is laid out in shapes, pressed, salted and sent for ripening. The soft variety ripens for about 45 days, the hard one - up to 6 months.
It's hardly worth cooking this Italian cheese on your own, and it's not so much the presence of a large number of technological tricks and the creation of special conditions for ripening, but rather the lack of proper raw materials. In Europe, it is not for nothing that each standing cheese is assigned to a specific geographic area. The fact is that different breeds of cows living in different climatic conditions, and milk is different. Therefore, if you do not have the opportunity to find milk from Piedmont cows, the same taste, no matter how you follow the technology, will still not work.
