A wheel of parmesan cheese can cost over $1,000. A single wheel takes at least one year to age, 131 gallons of milk to make, and it can only be made in a restricted area in northern Italy, in the region of Emilia Romagna. We visited a dairy in Parma, Italy to find out how the cheese is made and why it is so expensive.
Luxury cousins to the mushroom, truffles are an indulgent food enjoyed across the world. But these fragrant fungi will cost you.
Canned sardines are a delicacy in Portugal. The country has a long fish-canning tradition, to the point that the sardine has become a national icon. We visited Conservas Pinhais, one of the oldest preserving factories in Portugal, that has kept its artisanal canning method since 1920. It makes 30,000 cans a day.
Agroittica Lombarda Group in northern Italy produces 15% of the world’s caviar. The most expensive caviar produced here, Beluga, cost $5,700 per kilogram. The group is split into two companies: Ars Italica Caviar and Calvisuis Caviar. We visited Ars Italica’s farm, where there are four species: Russian sturgeons, starred sturgeons, Adriatic sturgeons, and sterling sturgeons in the albino variety.
Iberian ham, or Jamón Ibérico, is one of the most expensive meats in the world. A leg of it can cost as much as $4,500. It is made from the rear leg of the black Iberian pig, a rare breed that can be found in the southern and western regions of the Iberian Peninsula, which comprises Spain and Portugal.
Insider’s Claudia Romeo traveled to Brittany, France to meet with Jean-Yves Bordier, a butter artisan who brought back to France the 19th-century technique of malaxage, using a big wooden wheel to knead the butter. To Jean-Yves, the malaxage is a more romantic way to make butter. At his workshop, everything is churned, kneaded, and shaped by hand.
Insider’s Claudia Romeo traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland to meet with James Macsween, a third-generation haggis producer who has turned his grandfather’s butcher shop into one of the most successful haggis companies in the UK. Haggis is spiced meat encased in animal intestines with salt, spices, and a few other ingredients depending on the recipe. Macsween’s haggis is made using lamb lungs, beef fat and a secret mixture of spices from a 67-year-old recipe.
Harvesting saffron requires a lot of physical labor to get the flowers from the field to final packaging. The harvesting process plus its distinct flavor, smell, and color make it the most expensive spice in the world. It’s used in kitchens across the world, as a fabric and skin dye, and may soon be used more widely for medicinal purposes.
Every summer, Isabella, her mother, Dina, and her daughter, Federica, honor the family tradition and make tomato sauce in their garden. The process is a laborious one that takes several hours, from handpicking each tomato to adding basil leaves into jars one by one. This year, the family has turned more than 200 kilos of tomatoes into sauce.
Greenland shark is the most toxic shark in the world. Due to its rich ammonia concentration, eating its fresh meat could even lead to death. Only after a long curing process, it becomes safe to eat. We traveled to Bjarnarhöfn, Iceland where one family has been curing Greenland sharks for hundreds of years.
The Gorgonzola industry is worth over $800 million. Almost 5 million wheels are produced each year and production is confined to the Italian regions of Piedmont and Lombardy. There are only 29 dairies in the world certified to produce this cheese. We visited Caseificio Si Invernizzi in Trecate, Piedmont, Italy, where between 450 and 500 Gorgonzola wheels are made every day.
Stilton cheese takes its name from the village of Stilton, in the east of England. The earliest reports of cheese made and sold here date to the 17th century. In 1724, English writer Daniel Defoe referred to the town being “famous for cheese,” calling the product the “English Parmesan.” Today, Stilton can only be made in six dairies, which are spread across three counties in England: Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire. We visited Colston Bassett Dairy in Nottinghamshire to learn more about the cheese is made.
We visited an olive oil mill in Italy in the southern region of Puglia, a region that alone supplies 40% of Italy’s olive oil production and 12% worldwide. Olive oil is an essential part of the culture here, from food to the picturesque landscape.
COCO KYOTO gathers the finest local ingredients and the best cacao beans from all over the world under the theme of “Kyoto Food Culture and Health”, and is ideal for health-conscious, sugar-free, gluten-free and food additive-free. I’m looking for chocolate. It was a good craft chocolate maker that won the international chocolate contest “International Chocolate Awards” for three consecutive years, 2017, 2018, 2019.
On this episode of ‘Handmade,’ master chocolate maker Carolina Quijano walks us through her chocolate-making process, from hand selecting the best cocoa beans in the world to the roasting process to grinding, sifting, molding, and more. The result is pure and delicious chocolate from her shop Exquisito Chocolates in Miami. https://www.exquisitochocolates.com/
PuckerButt Pepper Company founder Ed Currie is on a mission to create the world’s hottest peppers. Ed is the evil genius who brought the world the Carolina Reaper, one of the hottest hot peppers in existence; but he’s not stopping there.
