| Headword | Provolone Valpadana cheese |
| Domain and subdomain | Nutrition – dairy products (cheese) |
| Grammatical label | Noun, sing. |
| Definition | It is a cheese with spun paste, produced thanks to cow milk, aged (at least 3 months), sweet or spicy, with several possible forms: truncated cone, pear, melon, salame or flask. (1) |
| Note | Provolone Valpadana is a PDO cheese, with spun paste and ivory or straw-yellow-coloured. The classic variety is flask-shaped; the other most famous shapes are salame, melon/pear and conical trunk. (2) The zone of production concerns the territory of Cremona, Brescia, some parts of Bergamo, Lodi, Mantova, Verona, Vicenza, Padova, Rovigo, Piacenza and Trento. The crust is smooth thin, light yellow-coloured, golden and sometimes yellow-brunish. The paste is compact and straw-yellow coloured. The flavour is delicate for the sweet variety, stronger for the spicy one. It is used for many recipes and to enrich a high number of plates. Some curls of butter is the perfect combination for the spicy variety, while the sweet one is better combined with salt, pepper, oil and eventually with chopped herbs. Provolone Valpadana is also perfectly combined with bread, pears, nuts, but it can also be diced in salads. (3) |
| Context | The Provolone Valpadana is a P.D.O. “pasta filata” cheese. Its origins are from Southern Italy although nowadays it is produced in other Italian regions. Presently, the main production areas are based in the Venetian Region, in Lombardy and in particular in the province of Cremona (all the three places are located in Northern Italy). (4) |
| Phonetic transcription | [provo‘lone valpa‘dana ˈtʃiːz] |
| Synonyms/Variants | ND |
| Etymology | Provolone is a big dimension variety of the Italian region Campania “provola”, that started to be produced in the Padana Plain from the last decades of the XIX century. (5) |
| Product image |  |
| Equivalents | ITA Provolone Valpadana ESP Queso Provolone Valpadana FRA Provolone Valpadana RO Provolone Valpadana |
| Note of the equivalents | The Italian denomination is kept. |
| Institution | Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali |
| Date | 05/08/2021 |
| Last modified | 31/05/2023 |
| Author Revisor | Margherita Baroni Chiara Buschi Gloria Zanella |
| Sources | 1) Dizionario Italiano – Il Sabatini Coletti 2) https://www.provolonevalpadana.it/ 3) https://www.qualigeo.eu/prodotto-qualigeo/provolone-valpadana-dop/ 4) https://www.clal.it/en/?section=produzioni_provolone 5) https://www.provolonevalpadana.it/storia-del-provolone-valpadana/ 6) https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.soloprodottiitaliani.it%2Fupload_pc%2Fprodotti%2F2592_immagine_0.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.soloprodottiitaliani.it%2Fformaggio%2Fprovolone-valpadana-dop%2F2592-provolone-valpadana-dop.html&tbnid=3j7CL8lK8WIlOM&vet=12ahUKEwiNj9ih4oXyAhVPwaQKHUmvDu8QMygjegUIARDfAQ..i&docid=tKs_DEU8iv1FZM&w=389&h=520&q=provolone%20valpadana&ved=2ahUKEwiNj9ih4oXyAhVPwaQKHUmvDu8QMygjegUIARDfAQ |
