Why You Should Never Buy Grated Parmesan, and Other Insights From Marcella Hazan

There's no Italian ingredient more classic than Parmigiano-Reggiano, but in Marcella Hazan's posthumously released book, she still has new knowledge to share.
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Every home cook that's ever said "simple is best" owes something to Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan. Her approach, expressed in books like The Essential of Classic Italian Cooking, emphasized simplicity over embellishment, straightforward home cooking over cheffy flourishes. Case in point: Her famous 3-ingredient tomato sauce. When Hazan passed away in 2013, she converted a generation of eaters into passionate home cooks.

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Thanks to her final book, Ingredienti, released posthumously with the help of her husband, Marcella continues to inspire, celebrating simple Italian ingredients with her unique style of bossy poetry. The book is less a glossary and more of a love letter, seen in our exclusive excerpt about Parmigiano-Reggiano, below.


The natural flavor of ingredients—my thoughts go to the ones I have known best in my life: to the vegetables grown in the salt-laden air of the Venetian lagoon’s farm islands; to that same lagoon’s small shellfish, the razor clams, the tiny soft-shelled crabs, the brown shrimp; to the olive oil from Lake Garda; to the peaches of my native Romagna; to the sweet San Daniele prosciutto from Friuli; to the tender lambs of the Roman Campagna; to the majestic red wines of the Langhe in Piedmont—each brings us the flavor of a single inimitable place. The paramount example of such flavor is that of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

It’s about the milk, a milk rich like no other, milk produced by the cows of a small, precisely mapped and legally protected area in northern Italy, enclosed almost entirely by the provinces of Parma and Reggio Emilia, where the country’s plushest pasture lies. It’s the milk, and the manual method by which it becomes cheese, a method that in nearly eight hundred years has changed only in the hands working it. It’s the milk, the method, and the aging, a slow two years’ maturation at natural, seasonal temperatures.

"It doesn't feel like a hard cheese; it is an increasingly creamy complex of satisfying sensations."

Christina Holmes

It’s the taste. Pry off and slowly munch a nugget of Parmigiano. In the warmth of your mouth its grainy texture slowly dissolves. It doesn’t feel like a hard cheese; it is an increasingly creamy complex of satisfying sensations, its fragrant layers of flavor steadily mounting and then tapering to a long, bracing, faintly bitter back taste like that of apricot or peach stones. If up to now you have used Parmigiano-Reggiano only for grating, you will regret having denied yourself the pleasure of one of the greatest of table cheeses.

The thousands of dairies supplying milk to the hundreds of cheese makers that produce Parmigiano-Reggiano labor under the rigorous supervision of the biologists and agronomists of the Consortium, an efficient and authoritarian entity that has emphasized consistency, sometimes at the expense of individual artisanal variations. There are variations nonetheless, largely derived from the season in which the cheese is produced.

"The two most significant differences in the seasonal characteristics of Parmigiano-Reggiano are between the summer cheese and the winter cheese."

Photo by Romulo Yanes

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The date of production is burned into the rind of the cheese, and you can easily learn it if your cheese monger displays a whole wheel of cheese. The two most significant differences in the seasonal characteristics of Parmigiano-Reggiano are between the summer cheese and the winter cheese. The summer is dryer, grainier, and more pungent. Its consistency and accented flavor are ideal for grating. The winter cheese is milder, richer in butterfat, delicious at table. Some people prefer what they discern as the more balanced flavors of autumn’s Parmigiano, others the herbaceous fragrances of the spring cheese. In reality, Parmigiano produced at any time of the year is a superior hard cheese both for table use and for grating.

One enduring, and possibly expanding, variation in Parmigiano character is the cheese derived from the Razza Reggiana breed, otherwise known as the Red Cow. Originally all Parmigiano-Reggiano was made from Red Cow milk, but the dominant breed today is the spotted Friesian breed, a more abundant milk producer. A small resurgence of Red Cow breeding is going on, and its Parmigiano is available at online and retail cheese mongers both. The color of the cheese is yellower, and its flavor is nuttier, grassier, richer, and more emphatic. It is believed to be suitable for aging well beyond the customary twenty-four months. Should you find a source of Parmigiano-Reggiano made from the milk of Red Cows that were grown on mountain pasturage rather than in the plains, you may be onto the ultimate version of a cheese that is the ultimate to begin with.

If you have access to a good cheese monger, buy a wedge of Parmigiano pried fresh from the wheel rather than the plastic-wrapped chunks from the supermarket. The rind you get with it is a bonus, because you can enrich a soup or a braise with a piece or two of it. Examine the opened wheel on display. The cheese should look dewy. If the part against the rind looks chalky, the cheese has been stored badly and is drying out.

"The rind you get with it is a bonus."

Tuukka Koski food styling: Alison Attenborough, prop styling: kalen kaminski

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When you have found a reliable source of Parmigiano-Reggiano, consider buying a substantial piece of it. If scrupulously stored and refrigerated, it keeps quite well. I can store it for many months before using it up. If the piece you’ve bought is very large, split it in two or more parts.

Wrap it tightly in a layer of good cheesecloth. I buy mine from the King Arthur Baker’s Catalogue. Over the cheesecloth, wrap a sheet of special cheese paper, available from Formaticum, or aluminum foil, fastening it tightly with paper tape. Refrigerate it, enclosing it, if you wish, in a large resealable plastic bag. Rewrap the cheese with a fresh piece of cheesecloth every ten days. If white spots show on the surface, they signal the presence of the amino acids that contribute to the desirable graininess of the cheese. If a few green moldy spots appear, simply scrape them off. If the cheese is beginning to look chalky, it is drying. Replace the cheesecloth with a freshly moistened piece, wrap the cheese in it, wrap aluminum foil over it, and refrigerate overnight to replenish the cheese’s moisture. The following day, rewrap it, replacing the moist cheesecloth with a dry piece.


Do not buy grated cheese, nor have a store grate cheese for you, nor grate it at home too long in advance of using it. Once grated, it begins to lose moisture. A way of knowing how an Italian restaurant uses Parmigiano is to ask if you could have a chunk of the cheese to eat at table. It is possible that they do not have any.

A crostino of Parmigiano is always a good idea.

Photo by Romulo Yanes

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Let me introduce you to the crostino of Parmigiano and olive oil that my husband’s grandmother used to prepare for him when he was a schoolboy in Bologna. Grill slices of good, plain, crusty bread to a pale brown and lay them on a tray. Blanket the bread with abundant freshly grated Parmigiano, allowing an excess of cheese to drop onto the tray.

Pour enough olive oil over it to soak the cheese thoroughly, not caring if some of the oil spills onto the tray. After eating the crostino, use a slice or two of bread to wipe up the oil and cheese from the tray. Your fingers will get sticky. Victor used to lick his.

Excerpted from Ingredienti: Marcella’s Guide to the Market by Marcella Hazan and Victor Hazan. Copyright © 2016 by Marcella Hazan and Victor Hazan. Illustrations copyright © 2016 by Karin Krestchmann Lubart. Published by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted with permission.