Lou Bergiere Pichin, from Fattorie Fiandino in the Piedmont region of Italy. The french-sounding name (“pichin” means “little shepherd” in Piedmontese dialect) is a testament to the region’s cross-cultural pollination with France. Villafalletto, the town in the Cuneo province where Fiandino is located, is equidistant between Milan and Nice, and Piedmont has in the past been a French territory.
The unusual cross-cultural references don’t end there: the Pichin is coagulated with enzymes from wild-harvested alpine flowers and naturally occurring lactic acids, using the traditional “kinara” method, a technique far more common in Spain and Portugal than Italy.
This natural-rinded tomme is made with raw cows milk, and features a stony-gray, mottled rind scattered with white and yellow molds. The ivory-colored, lightly eyed and open paste is soft and chewy, warming to an oozing, luscious texture.
In flavor it is milky and tangy, mushroomy, and lightly herbaceous and floral (perhaps due to the dried blossoms used in the coagulation process), with a bit of barny pungency and meatiness and just a subtle bitter finish; in fact it’s notably lacking in the the stronger (but not necessarily bad) bitterness that often marks plant-coagulated cheeses.
Purchased at Stinky Brooklyn.
This is lovely: The ivory-colored, lightly eyed and open paste is soft and chewy, warming to an oozing, luscious texture.
