YORKTOWN — Cracking open a giant wheel of aged Italian Grana Padano cheese in a grocery store is no small thing.
There are some varieties of cheese wheels that clock in at 90 pounds.
Customers gathered around in Uncle Giuseppe’s Marketplace Thursday, June 4, as Dennis Linkowski, the store’s cheese manager, reached for specialized tools. It was National Cheese Day, and he was about to use them to finesse the cleaving open of a cheese the size of a small nation.
How it’s done
Linkowski showed the gathered customers that if he simply tried to push one of the tools into the cheese from the top, it wouldn’t work.
Instead, first, he “scored” the cheese, using a tool to kind of carve a line across the cheese wheel’s top, then cut down one side of the wheel. Then, he spun the wheel and did the same things to the other side.
Linkowski and another employee next flipped the wheel over.
The scoring allowed Linkowski to fit the special tools inside, eventually to crack open the wheel.
“We’re going to do it two more times, and guess what? In five minutes, you guys are all going to be eating,” Linkowski said.
The history of Grana Padano
Grana Padano, a crumbly, crystalline cheese, has its own protected designation of origin, or DOP (similar to the way champagne can only be called that if it’s from France’s Champagne region). The cheese originated in about 1135 and comes from Italy’s Po River Valley. It has to age for at least 6 to 12 months and for up to two years.
“One of my favorite cheeses in the world,” Linkowski said.
It’s one of the oldest. Centuries ago, monks in the region raised cattle and came up with the hard cheese as a way to preserve milk at a time when it would last only a day or so, as refrigeration was a futuristic dream.
‘Crack that wheel!’
A news release previewing Thursday’s event called it the “Great Grana Crack,” and soon the moment would arrive. Linkowski put multiple tools into the cheese, leaning his body into it at times, flipping the wheel again, then putting the tools into the other side.
“Crack that wheel! Crack that wheel!” the crowd chanted, and Linkowski smiled.
Then, with a cleaving motion, the one wheel finally became two half-moons.
“Wow!” came from someone in the crowd.
After all that, the fun part: People got to sample the Grana Padano.
The National Cheese Day wheel-cracking demonstration was set to be done at nine Uncle Giuseppe’s locations Thursday, with the others on Long Island and in New Jersey.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: ‘Crack that wheel!’ The day Uncle Giuseppe’s cut the cheese
Reporting by Michael P. McKinney, Rockland/Westchester Journal News / Rockland/Westchester Journal News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Michael P. McKinney, Rockland/Westchester Journal News | USA TODAY Network
