Customer Reviews

Italian Cheese: A Guide to Their Discovery and Appreciation

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This is an incredible and thorough resource on Italian cheeses. It doesn't have every Italian cheese known to man, but it comes close. The book is organized by region, and each page is devoted to one cheese. Fun to read if you love exploring new foods and a great resource if you're traveling to Italy.

I purchased this guide with the hopes of using it as a tool when I walked into a cheese store in the US or Rome to decide what new (to me) cheeses to try.

I have found it very frustrating for that purpose. First, it is organized by region of Italy whereas it would typically be more useful to be organized by type of cheese (goat vs. cow milk, blue cheese vs. white cheese, etc). I always find myself reading the book through its index and flipping from front to middle to back of book to decide which cheese of a particular type looks fun.

When I tried to use this book in Rome last week I gave up. The diversity of cheeses is far wider than listed here. To take a concrete example, one store offered a "gorgonzola di buffala dolce." Nothing in this book's description of gorgonzola helped me figure out if the cheese was worth buying (it was). Indeed, the book does not even discuss the very important distinction of dolce vs. picante for gorgonzola.