Fiscalini Cheese is enjoying some well-deserved time in the limelight, this year, as the company’s Lionza keeps racking up award wins. After taking home a sofi™ Award earlier this year, the company’s signature Swiss-style cheese again earned accolades last month—this time taking home a coveted Super Gold award at the 2018 World Cheese Awards, hosted by the Guild of Fine Foods in Bergen, Norway.
“This win was incredible, Lionza has received a lot of recognition lately and we are very excited! It takes time to perfect a recipe, the aging process, and to determine the best possible release date of an aged cheese,” said Laura Genasci, Managing Partner for Fiscalini Cheese. “We are confident that we have found the ideal combination of all these factors and the win confirms that.”
A hand-crafted raw cow’s milk cheese, made in 26-pound wheels and aged 6 months, Lionza traces its roots back to 18th-century Switzerland, when Laura’s ancestors—the Fiscalini family—first began making cheese.
“Lionza is a Swiss Alpine style cheese that has a natural rind, a few irregular eyes, and semi-soft springy texture … [It] is a cheese that took a lot of research to create—a process that started with a trip to Lionza, a small village in Switzerland where the Fiscalini family is from,” Laura told me. “The goal was to learn about how the Fiscalinis made cheese generations ago and to copy that method with the use of modern-day techniques.”
Not content with producing what the Specialty Food Association and Guild of Fine Foods already acknowledge as one of the world’s best cheeses, Laura tells me that Fiscalini Cheese is continuing to innovate and invest in expanding—and improving—its cheesemaking facilities and processes.
“We are currently trying to perfect the aging process of our raw milk cheeses by investing in equipment that helps to better control temperature and humidity within our aging rooms,” said Laura. “We are focused on condensing our line to perfect the cheeses we craft best. Also, to add storage for cheeses like Lionza that we do not make often enough due to constraints in the plant.”
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