Moliterno Al Tartufo

Moliterno al Tartufo is a hard sheep's milk cheese from Sardinia, injected with a black truffle paste midway through aging so the truffle reads as loud as the cheese itself. You can see it the moment it's cut: dark truffle veins running through an ivory, slightly flaky paste, with the aroma coming off the wheel before the knife is even down.

The texture is firm and crumbly, the kind of pressed sheep-milk paste that shaves clean and holds together at room temperature. The truffle sits right in the middle of the palate, deeply earthy and mushroomy, with a salted, brothy backbone from the sheep milk that keeps it from tipping into one-note truffle. The finish is long. The truffle stays on the tongue for a good while after the cheese is gone.

What makes this one worth grabbing is the timing of the truffle injection. It goes in after the wheel has already started to age, so the truffle aroma is preserved instead of being cooked out by the full aging cycle. That is why the truffle here reads real and fresh rather than faded, and why a shaving over hot pasta or a warm risotto lets the whole wheel do its job.