What to eat in Bergamo, Italy (part 2)

21.04.2022

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After your pasta dishes…

In Bergamo, a typical Sunday lunch consists of polenta with meat.

Polenta is the most popular dish of the city, and its main ingredients are cornmeal, water and salt. Another version of the classic polenta is known as Polenta Taragna, which contains cornmeal, buckwheat, butter and different cheeses (such as Branzi or Emmental). Polenta used to be cooked in a copper pan over the fire, but nowadays a regular pan is just as good as the copper one.

People usually eat polenta with meat stews, sautéed mushrooms, meats like beef or rabbit, sausages and/or cheeses like Taleggio or Gorgonzola.

Leftover polenta can also be used to create many interesting dishes.

Cheeses

When eating polenta delicious are salami and cheeses.

Bergamo, but also the whole Lombardy, are famous for their many cheeses. Bergamo province is in first place in Italy for the number of PDO cheeses, and there are approximately 150 working alpine pastures.

Strachitunt cheese: it was originally invented to reuse the wastes from the stracchino cheese processing, with the curd crumbled and put into round moulds. It is a blue cheese due to its veining and it is raw. The older the cheese is the more intense the bitter aftertaste will be. Less-ripened strachitunt has a sweet and delicate taste.

Formagella della Val di Scalve: slighty sour, but very tasty, it is a half-cooked cheese and matures over at least 20 days.

Agrì di Valtorta: it is cow’s milk fresh cheese, small and sour. Only a few farmers give the raw milk to the village’s small cooperative which produces this cheese. Its taste is initially sweet then savory and bitter. If it is ripened you can taste notes of mushrooms, hazelnuts and dried fruits.

Quartirolo Lombardo DOP: it is made as soon as the milk gets milked. It is a white cheese with a lumpy texture, with a savory taste when fresh and a sweet one when ripened.