Cheese Made for Sharing

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Alex Mackay, cook, teacher, writer, and food lover serves up a collection of his recipes made for sharing showing the versatility of Grana Padano PDO cheese. With lite bites to quick pasta: brunch to supper standbys you can find recipes for every occasion in the recipe collection here.

Cheese was my first true love and by far the longest lasting. I’ve been dedicated in my desire to discover, eat, and cook it for the best part of 50 years.

So, when I’ve been asked to use Grana Padano in every way imaginable, the ideas are so plentiful that more than flow, they bottleneck, jostle for attention until the only most tenacious pop out. I engage with this ingredient on the sort of level you can only do with an old friend or lover, someone you think you know everything about yet always surprises you with something new. This glorious Grana Padano cheese keeps things fresh at the same time as it indulges me with old favourites. So, I can revel in the warm comfort of familiarity while constantly keeping it fresh.

I’ve learnt so much along the way, Chef Danilo Cortellini taught me to think of Grana Padano as a seasoning, and Bravo, why add salt when you can add cheese, genius! Chef Francesco Mezzei taught me the delicious and deliriously creamy art of the of “mantecatura”- to finish risotto and pasta with a stir, a shake, a fold and a flourish until each grain or strand glistens irresistibly with mostly melted cheese.

Look along these recipes and you’ll find a new way to prepare and cook asparagus that means more of everything, from quantity and colour to taste. In the same recipe, I give you the way to transform a spoonful of Grana Padano into a crisp. There is a way to cook duck breast which means that you render the fat rather than being overwhelmed by it, and that you do it calmly, having fun frying instead of being attacked by spitting fat.

If it’s pasta you fancy, try my Tiger Prawn Macaroni Cheese where the stock cooks into the pasta, transforming it into delicately flavoured “trompe l’oeil” prawns, or Penne with a Thousand Things as to move you into spring and the glorious greens it brings. These two pasta recipes, rounded off with Grana Padano, open the door to a multitude of new recipes and an intensity of flavour you may not have encountered before. I use a glorious technique that I’ve developed over the last decade... Pasta, cooked like pilaff, to get a risotto consistency.

This cheese gives you plenty of varieties for texture too, although Grana Means “Grainy”, it can be long shards in a salad, or crisply cling to turkey to create a cheesy coating that you’ll think about long after you eat.  It becomes a crust for cauliflower, the seasoning in a pea puree, or the oomph in no-meatballs.  Everywhere you look, there are tips and tricks, even for the best way to test if your vegetables are cooked without burning your lips, along with wonderful ways to incorporate Grana Padano into food that’s made for sharing.