Moliterno

Moliterno
Comes from: sheep (huh)
Purchased at: DiBruno Brothers
$14.99/lb

(No, that didn't take long.)

Did you know pecorino comes from sheep? I had no idea. I just always thought of pecorino as parmesan's saltier, grittier cousin, excellent on a rosetta or pasta aglio e olio. But parmesan comes from cows, and pecorino comes from sheep, and suddenly I don't know how I feel about pecorino anymore.

Anyway.

So this cheese is pretty good, though not quite as good as I'd hoped when I sampled it yesterday or when I finally freed it from its shrink-wrapped tomb a little while ago. Oddly, in texture and taste and odor it reminded me more of parmesan than pecorino, and more of your American, cheap-o parmesans than the good stuff. You know how, if you've bought the right kind of parmesan, the cheese fragments along its own fault lines as you cut it? And if you've bought the wrong (geometrically perfect) kind, the cheese totally *doesn't* fragment, but just yields moistly to the knife like a slightly-harder sharp cheddar? This cheese doesn't fragment.

Which doesn't automatically make it wrong, of course, because it's *not* parmesan, and it's only a cousin of pecorino, but I thought it worth mentioning. Mostly because now you know that parmesan should fragment, according to me.

Anyway. So this cheese is softer and wetter than your traditional pecorino, is what I'm saying. Less salty, too, which -- because I am a salt fiend -- to me also means less tasty. I'm accustomed to some kind of bite from my pecorino, and this cheese is more mild than that.

DiBruno's packaging reads:

A pecorino cheese aged incanestri (in baskets) to drain whey and give a distinctive marked rind, rubbed with olive oil and suet, moliterno retains moisture as it ages and takes on a pleasant meaty and substantial flavor without overwhelming sharpness or salt. Excellent tossed in olive oil or grated over fresh pasta and greens.

[Okay, so I corrected some comma errors.]

Which is more or less what I said, only I recommend you *not* fall down the internet rabbit-hole of googling "suet," then wondering, "hey, so is rennet different from suet?" and *then* thinking, "hey, so can kosher Jews not eat good cheese?" and following *that* with a search that sadly, does not reveal which cheeses do and do not contain suet/rennet/other animal bits.

In other news, the olive oil surprised me when I first opened the packaging; most cheeses don't leak, so I was a little bit concerned.

Anyway. So that's this cheese. It's not my favorite item in the firm cheese family, but it's good, and would probably be delicious on really crusty bread. (But then, almost anything is delicious on really crusty bread.) Or! Or actually it would probably be a good cheese to pair with your saltier meats, because it's not so salty itself. Sadly, I don't have any deli meat in the house, and also, I have eaten all the cheese.