Casu marzu: The arena’s ‘most threatening’ cheese

(CNN) — The Italian island of Sardinia sits in the course of the Tyrrhenian Sea, staring at at Italy from a distance. Surrounded by way of a 1,849-kilometer beach of white sandy seashores and emerald waters, the island’s inland panorama hastily rises to shape hills and impervious mountains.

And it’s inside of those edgy curves that shepherds produce casu marzu, a maggot-infested cheese that, in 2009, the Guinness International Document proclaimed the arena’s most threatening cheese.

Cheese skipper flies, Piophila casei, lay their eggs in cracks that shape in cheese, typically fiore sardo, the island’s salty pecorino.

Maggots hatch, making their manner during the paste, digesting proteins within the procedure, and remodeling the product right into a cushy creamy cheese.

Then the cheesemonger cracks open the highest — which is nearly untouched by way of maggots — to scoop out a spoonful of the creamy delicacy.

It is not a second for the faint-hearted. At this level, the grubs within start to writhe frantically.

Some locals spin the cheese thru a centrifuge to merge the maggots with the cheese. Others love it au naturel. They open their mouths and consume the entirety.

If you’ll be able to triumph over the comprehensible disgust, marzu has a taste this is intense with reminders of the Mediterranean pastures and highly spiced with an aftertaste that remains for hours.

“The maggot infestation is the spell and enjoyment of this cheese,” says Paolo Solinas, a 29-year-old Sardinian gastronome.

He says some Sardinians recoil on the considered casu marzu, however others raised on an entire life of salty pecorino unabashedly love its robust flavors.

“Some shepherds see the cheese as a novel private excitement, one thing that only a few elects can check out,” Solinas provides.

Archaic delicacies

When vacationers talk over with Sardinia, they typically finish up in a cafe that serves porceddu sardo, a slowly roasted suckling piglet, talk over with bakers who promote pane carasau, a standard paper-thin flatbread, and meet shepherds who produce fiore sardo, the island pecorino cheese.

But, if you’re adventurous sufficient, it is imaginable to search out the casu marzu. It should not be noticed as a unusual enchantment, however a product that helps to keep alive an historic custom and hints at what the way forward for meals would possibly appear to be.

Giovanni Fancello, a 77-year-old Sardinian journalist and gastronome, spent his existence researching native meals historical past. He is traced it again to a time when Sardinia was once a province of the Roman empire.

“Latin was once our language, and it is in our dialect that we discover strains of our archaic delicacies,” Fancello says.

There’s no written report of Sardinian recipes till 1909, in line with Fancello. That is when Vittorio Agnetti, a physician from mainland Modena, traveled to Sardinia and compiled six recipes in a ebook known as “L. a. nuova cucina delle specialità regionali.”

“However now we have all the time eaten worms,” says Fancello. “Pliny the Elder and Aristotle mentioned it.”

Ten different Italian areas have their variant of maggot-infested cheese, however whilst the goods in other places are considered one-offs, casu marzu is intrinsically a part of Sardinian meals tradition.

The cheese has a number of other names, corresponding to casu becciu, casu fattittu, hasu muhidu, formaggio marcio. Each and every sub-region of the island has its personal manner of manufacturing it the use of other forms of milk.

‘Magic and supernatural occasions’

Foodies impressed by way of the exploits of cooks corresponding to Gordon Ramsay frequently come on the lookout for the cheese, says Fancello. “They ask us: ‘How do you’re making casu marzu?’ It is a part of our historical past. We’re the sons of this meals. It is the results of probability, of magic and supernatural occasions.”

Fancello grew up within the the town of Thiesi together with his father Sebastiano, who was once a shepherd who made casu marzu. Facello shepherded his circle of relatives’s sheep to grazing grounds round rural Monte Ruju, misplaced within the clouds, the place magic was once believed to occur.

He recollects that, for his father, casu marzu was once a divine reward. If his cheeses did not turn into infested with maggots, he could be determined. One of the most cheese he produced stayed for the circle of relatives, others went to pals or individuals who requested for it.

Casu Marzu is normally produced on the finish of June when native sheep milk starts to modify because the animals input their reproductive time and the grass dries from the summer season warmth.

If a heat sirocco wind blows at the cheesemaking day, the cheese-transforming magic works even tougher. Fancello says it is because the cheese has a weaker construction, making the fly’s process more straightforward.

After 3 months, the delicacy is in a position.

“You realize when a sort will turn into casu marzu,” he says. “You spot it from the peculiar spongy texture of the paste,” Murrocu says.

At the present time, this is not such a lot all the way down to success as the perfect stipulations that cheesemongers now use to verify as many casu marzu as imaginable. They have got additionally discovered some way to make use of glass jars to preserve the cheese, which historically by no means lasted past September, for years.

Prime fines

Even though respected, the cheese’s felony standing is a grey house.

Casu marzu is registered as a standard manufactured from Sardinia and subsequently is in the community safe. Nonetheless, it’s been deemed unlawful by way of the Italian executive since 1962 because of regulations that restrict the intake of meals inflamed by way of parasites.

Those that promote the cheese can face top fines as much as €50,000 (about $60,000) however Sardinians snicker when requested concerning the prohibition in their liked cheese.

“Loads of cultures affiliate the insect with an factor,” Flore says. That mentioned, Sardinians want the cheese to the maggot and are frequently horrified by way of the concept folks consume scorpions or crickets in Thailand.

Flore says he is traveled world wide to review how other cultures means bugs as meals and believes that whilst mental limitations make it tough to radically adjust consuming conduct, such intake is standard.

Open thoughts

“How do you outline fit to be eaten meals?” he says .”Each and every area of the arena has a special option to consume bugs.”

He is satisfied that Sardinia’s delicacy is fit for human consumption.

“I consider that no person has ever died consuming casu marzu. In the event that they did, perhaps they had been inebriated. You realize, while you consume it, you additionally drink a lot of wine.”

Flore hopes casu marzu will quickly shed its clandestine standing and turn into a logo of Sardinia — now not as a result of its peculiar manufacturing, however as a result of it is emblematic of different meals now vanishing as a result of they do not have compatibility in with trendy mainstream tastes.

Islanders and researchers hope that the Ecu Union will quickly rule of their prefer.

Till then, somebody who desires to pattern it’s going to wish to ask round once they get to Sardinia.

For the ones keen to droop issues about what they are consuming, it provides an unique enjoy recalling a time when not anything was once thrown away and when obstacles of what was once fit to be eaten or now not had been much less neatly outlined.

Cheesemonger Murrocu says that, fittingly, locals stay an open thoughts about one of the best ways to consume casu marzu, however a couple of different regional treats had been identified to assist it slip down more straightforward.

“We unfold the cheese on rainy pane carasau, and we consume it,” he says. “However you’ll consume it as you wish to have, so long as there may be some formaggio marcio and a just right cannonau wine.”