Italy's most famous blue cheese is bold, assertive and intensely flavorful.

Legend has it that this cheese was created by accident: An inattentive cheesemaker left some fresh milk out to drain for too long. Hoping it wouldn’t make a difference to the batch of cheese he planned to make, he used the resulting curd anyway. Months later, he found that some of his cave-aged wheels had a strange blue-green streak of mold. With some trepidation, he tasted the new cheese and found it was terrific. Today, most blue cheeses are injected with mold-producing bacteria to speed the process along. This modern process has had little effect on the flavor of the cheese and most gorgonzola is still cave aged for some period of time.

Gorgonzola’s greenish-blue mold gives this cheese a sharp flavor that contrasts nicely with the creamy paste. It is sharp, crumbly and assertive in flavor. It pairs well with berries, pears, peaches, plums, walnuts and honey. For an authentic Italian treat, try it with the region’s mostarda di Cremona, a sweet and spicy fruit chutney. Gorgonzola is also excellent in risotto and polenta, mixed into vinaigrette, melted on pizza or used as a dip.

In days of old, gorgonzola was a stracchino cheese, meaning it was made with the milk of stracchio or “tired” cattle that were milked while on their way to (or back from) their seasonal pastures. Although gorgonzola is now made year-round, it continues to be produced in essentially the same way it has for over a thousand years.

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Create a truly unique antipasto dish with our Gorgonzola-stuffed Cucumbers recipes.