Amatrice Bislacco

Amatrice Bislacco is a sheep's milk cheese from Amatrice, a mountain town in Lazio best known as the birthplace of pasta all'amatriciana. It's a pressed, semi-hard pecorino-style wheel with a natural rind and a few months of age on it, made in the pastures of the central Apennines where sheep have been the backbone of the local dairy tradition for generations.

The paste is ivory and dense, with a slightly grainy break under the knife and enough moisture that it still bends before it snaps. Toasted almond, a little browned butter, and that sweet-cream note that only sheep's milk really gives you sit on the front of the palate, with a light hay-and-meadow character underneath from the mountain grazing. There's just a whisper of pepper on the finish, nothing like a sharp aged Romano, which is what puts it right in the middle-ground sweet spot: savory enough to grate, gentle enough to eat off the board.

Bislacco roughly translates to eccentric or quirky in Italian, and this one earns the name by sitting between styles, not quite a young table pecorino, not quite an aged grating cheese. Shave it over pasta, break it into rustic chunks alongside cured meats, or just eat it with a drizzle of chestnut honey.