Description
Asiago DOP Mezzano is a semi-fat hard cheese with a semi-cooked paste, typical of the homonymous plateau of the Alps. It has a smooth and regular rind, while the paste is compact and grainy with a straw-yellow color, featuring small to medium-sized scattered holes. Its flavor is decidedly sweet. Asiago DOP Mezzano is produced from the dairy transformation of milk from one or two milkings of exclusively cow origin; after collection and before cheese-making, the milk undergoes an initial partial skimming treatment by creaming and may then be thermized at a later stage. This cheese is obtained by subjecting the form to at least 4 months of aging, for a maximum period of 10 months. Aged Asiago, also known as d'allevo, has distant origins in the homonymous plateau that for centuries allowed the local population to live off the land and the great sheep pastures. It was around the year 1000 that the tasty cheese made with sheep's milk was born, which even today, in the lively Vicenza dialect, is called "pegorin." Documents from those years testify that this cheese had become so renowned that the inhabitants of the seven municipalities paid duties and taxes to the lords of Padua in the form of cheese wheels. However, it was around the 16th century that cattle began to be preferred over sheep because their grazing method, without tearing the grass from the roots but gently shaving it, allowed for the prevention of landslides and erosion of the thin layer of humus covering the underlying rocks. Cow's milk thus replaced sheep's milk, leading to the birth of the cheese-making technique that is still preserved and passed down in the mountain huts of the Asiago plateau and has been transferred to the dairies of the surrounding territories of the provinces of Vicenza and Trento, which form the production area of Asiago DOP cheese. Asiago DOP Mezzano is indeed the one that most closely adheres to the rigorous tradition of the plateau cheesemakers. Asiago obtained the Protected Designation of Origin in 1996, becoming a symbol of Made in Italy food worldwide, highly appreciated not only in Italy but also abroad. Asiago is a typical cheese of the homonymous plateau and is produced in the area that stretches from the Po Valley to the pastures of the Asiago Plateau and Trentino. The milk collection and production area of Asiago DOP cheese specifically touches four provinces: the entire Vicenza and Trentino and a small part of Padua and Treviso.