The panino con Bra is a single Piedmontese cheese given a bread, and like several of the great Italian denominations it is really two cheeses sharing one name and one town. Bra DOP comes from the cattle country around the town of Bra in the province of Cuneo, and it splits by age into Bra tenera and Bra duro. The tenera is the young form, pale and elastic, supple and milky with a faint lactic tang, a table cheese that slices clean and slackens with a little warmth. The duro is aged for months until it turns straw-coloured, firm, dry, and pointedly savoury, closer to a grating cheese than to its own younger self. The defining decision in the sandwich is which Bra, because the two behave so differently that the same wheel makes almost different panini.
The craft is matching the form of the cheese to the bread and the dressing. The tenera is cut thick and laid in slabs, mild enough to be the quiet centre and soft enough that heat from a freshly cut roll starts it yielding; it wants a plain, fairly soft Piedmontese loaf so nothing argues with its gentleness, and almost no dressing beyond perhaps a little butter. The duro is the opposite problem: dry and assertive, it is cut thinner or shaved and met with something that answers its salt, often a sturdier crusted bread and a touch of honey, a few walnuts, or the regional cugnà, the grape-must and fruit preserve of Piedmont, so the sharpness has a sweet counter. The bread and the accompaniment are dictated by the age of the cheese, not chosen in advance.
The variations stay inside the cheese and the same young-versus-aged logic: the mild tenera build eaten almost plain, the aged duro finished with honey or cugnà, the version that sets the firm cheese against a Piedmontese salame or a few slices of mocetta from the same alpine larder. Each of those is one expression of the wheel given a bread, and each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.