The counterintuitive thing about caciocavallo is that it is a stretched-curd cheese, kin to mozzarella and provolone, that is made to age and sharpen rather than to be eaten fresh and mild. The curd is heated and worked until it is elastic, then shaped into the distinctive gourd with a slender neck, tied in pairs, and hung to mature, the name itself describing cheeses slung a cavallo, astride a beam, to dry. Young, it is supple and faintly sweet; aged for months, it turns firm, straw-coloured, and pointedly piquant, with the savoury bite of a hard cheese kept inside a pasta filata body. The panino con caciocavallo, a sandwich of the Campanian and southern Italian deli counter, is a frame for that cheese at a chosen age and the discipline to let it lead.
The craft is matching the age of the cheese to the bread and to whether it is eaten cold or warmed. A younger caciocavallo is sliced thick and laid in slabs, mild enough to be the quiet centre and willing to slacken against a little warmth, which is why the South also griddles it: a slab heated until the outside blisters and the inside goes molten, then folded into bread while it still pulls into strands. An aged wheel is cut thinner or shaved, dry and assertive, and met with a sturdier crusted loaf and sometimes a fig or a thread of honey so its sharpness has a counter. The bread is plain because the cheese, hot or aged, is the entire voice and an assertive loaf would only argue with it. The cold build is assembled late; the griddled one is eaten the moment it comes off the heat.
The variations stay in the cheese and the same young-or-aged, cold-or-griddled logic, and several are distinct enough to be their own subjects: the prized version made from the milk of the Podolica breed, all locality and complexity; the Sila plateau PDO with its own protected character; the griddled caciocavallo impiccato eaten hot off the iron. Each is one expression of this cheese, and each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.