Gioddu

History, features and production area of Callu de Cabreddu

Known in Sardinia with many name variants (callu de cabreddu, callu de crabettu, crazu de crabittu…), this cheese testifies how good Sardinian people are at sorting things out when life is letting them down. Making a virtue of necessity, Sardinians started to make this cheese to preserve the fresh milk contained in the kid’s abomasum, the fourth stomach of lactating ruminants, knotting it up and seasoning it in cellars.

Besides the jam-looking appearance, this cheese’s main peculiarity is the way it is made. It is in fact a ‘reverse’ cheese, because the abomasum, whence it is generally extracted the rennet used in milk coagulation for cheese-making, is the king of the stage here. You will need to peel off the abdomen, though, prior to eating Callu de Cabreddu: inside you will discover a creamy paste or a hard, crumbly one depending on the ageing.

As already mentioned, this cheese’s taste is strong and varied: your mouth will be delighted with sweet notes turning abruptly into spicy and, at last, bitter ones. All of them are connected by this persistent, though not unpleasant, sour chorus. When the milk is not filtered appropriately, you may also find some goat’s hair that the kid sucked together with milk. It is certainly not a cheese which will please anyone’s taste, but it will remind you how people once lived, managing to create extraordinary products out of utter misery.