Panino con Canestrato Pugliese

Run a thumb across the side of a wheel of Canestrato Pugliese and it is ridged like woven rope, the print of the reed basket it firmed up inside. A dairyman rubs the rind with oil so those basket lines stand out, and that pattern is the cheese announcing exactly what it is before you taste a crumb of it. This is a hard sheep's-milk cheese from the Puglian tableland, drained and packed into a bulrush mould the locals call a canestro, then aged dry until the paste turns pale gold, granular, and sharp. Spread it on bread and the sandwich is one wedge of that cheese on a loaf chosen to keep out of its way. There is no second cheese, no meat, no leaf. A protected sheep's cheese this assertive is treated in Puglia as a thing to frame, not to garnish.

How you cut it has to follow how it breaks. Canestrato at a few months will not shave into ribbons; a thin slice on bread just slides loose and falls out the back. So it is broken with the point of a knife into thick uneven shards, and a broken chunk wedges against the crumb and gives the bite something to push against. The bread is the deep-crumbed durum loaf of the region, often pane di Altamura, whose own toasted-wheat weight meets a strong cheese head-on rather than vanishing under it. The only things that join it are answers to the cheese's own salt and dryness. A thread of Puglian oil to carry it. Sometimes a few drops of vincotto, the cooked-grape syrup, or a smear of fig against the piquancy. Nothing wet ever goes in, because moisture turns a granular aged cheese to paste and dulls the very edge that earns it the bread.

The build punishes the wrong age in opposite directions. A young wheel three months in is supple and mild, and shaved thin it disappears, reading as little more than salted milk; it needs the broken shard to register at all. A wheel ten months in has gone bone-dry and crystalline, and a thick chunk of it powders against the teeth and scratches the palate, so the old wheel wants grating coarse and a slick of oil to bind the dust back together. The loaf is the other failure line: an open chewy crumb under a thick crust drinks a little oil and braces the shard, where a soft white roll just slumps around it and goes greasy. Match a mid-aged wedge to a sturdy loaf and the two hold; miss the age and the same cheese either hides or cuts.

Break a shard off and the smell is lanolin and warm grass, the sheep in it unmistakable, with a sour mineral edge from the long cure underneath. The cheese is cool and grainy and snaps rather than bends, scattering small dry crystals as the teeth work it, the salt arriving sharp and then a slow piquant heat building behind it that catches the back of the throat. The durum crumb is dense and faintly sweet against all that salt, soaking the oil where the shard sits, dry and substantial between mouthfuls. A glass of Aglianico del Vulture, the dark red of the hills just inland, stands up to the salt and the lanolin without being flattened by either.

In a Puglian masseria or a town salumeria the wheel is cut to order off the wedge, the age the standing question at the counter: giovane for the supple young paste, stagionato for the dry sharp one that carries the loaf alone. In spring the local move is to set the cheese against fresh fava beans, the regional fave e pecorino custom that runs across the south, the raw green bean popped from its pod and eaten with a chip of the sharp cheese and a tear of bread, sometimes folded into the loaf together. It is grazing-flock food, eaten plain and standing, the cheese the constant and the season the variable. The wheel hung at the counter is sold by how long it has aged, and an older one is a different request entirely from a young one.

The variations turn on that age and on what the south allows beside a sharp sheep's cheese. There is the very aged wheel grated coarse over the loaf rather than shard-cut, the spring build with raw fava, the oil-and-vincotto version that leans sweet against the salt. What sits apart are the other Puglian sheep cheeses that share the milk but not the mould: the soft fresh cacioricotta drained without pressing, and the harder pecorino styles aged on their own breads, neither of which carries the reed-basket rind that names this one. The Canestrato is specifically the basket-printed, hard-aged, whole-sheep's-milk cheese the European register protects, and a wheel without that ridged rind is a different cheese wearing the same family.

The Basket and the Drove Road

The cheese is named for the thing that shapes it, and the thing that shapes it is a basket. Canestro is the woven reed mould the curd is pressed into, traditionally made from Apulian bulrush, a sweeter reed that does not lend its own taste to the paste, and the basketwork it leaves on the rind is the cheese's signature. The name records the vessel, and the vessel records the people who carried it, because for centuries this was a cheese made on the move.

It was made between December and May, the months the flocks spent wintering on the warm Puglian plain after walking down from the mountains of Abruzzo. That seasonal migration, the transumanza, ran the sheep along ancient drove roads from the Maiella massif to the Tavoliere lowland and back, and the cheese was the winter half of the journey set to ripen. The historian Giustino Fortunato caught the rhythm in a verse about a sheep summering on the Maiella and wintering on the plain, the two ends of the route the cheese lived between. When the droving largely ended in the 1950s and 1960s and the flocks settled, the cheese stayed, now made in fixed dairies and cooperatives across the Foggia and Bari country.

The cheese itself has no recorded inventor and no starting year, because it grew out of the southern droving life generations before any of it was set on paper, and it took the name of its basket rather than of a person. What can be fixed is the legal record, and it is recent. Italy recognised Canestrato Pugliese with a national designation of origin in 1985, and Europe granted it full protected-designation-of-origin status in 1996, binding the name to whole sheep's milk, the reed-basket mould, and the three Puglian provinces of Foggia, Bari, and Barletta-Andria-Trani where the wintering flocks once came to ground.