If you are lactose intolerant then Gorgonzola is the cheese for you. It is the only soft cheese entirely lactose-free. That’s what’s been said by Professor Mario Del Piano, chief of Gastroenterology at the Maggiore Hospital of Novara and faculty member of the Universities of Novara and Turin, who has been studying diseases of the digestive system since 1995. Thanks to a precise scientific analysis of 19 duplicate samples of Gorgonzola, examined by two different laboratories, it has been demonstrated the total absence of lactose.

According to Professor Del Piano "Lactose intolerance is a condition where the consumption of milk, dairy products and some types of cheese causes a non-allergic reaction characterized by unpleasant gastrointestinal disorders.”

"This condition is to be blamed on the lack or low expression levels of the enzymes responsible for the digestion of the lactose, the sugar that is found in milk, and other dairy products. Among these, the lactase enzyme is the main catalyst of the hydrolysis of lactose into glucose and galactose,” Professor Mario Del Piano said.

“We must remember that lactose is present in breast milk as the sole carbohydrate nutrition in early childhood. In infants, lactase activity is obviously high, being the main nutrient. In most people - explains Professor Del Piano - the enzyme begin to decrease in a post adolescence stage and reach its minimal levels as adults."

Thanks to its triple fermentation of milk: lactic, yeast, and then mold-driven fermentation, Gorgonzola is recommended to all those who, despite having lactose intolerance, do not want to turn down the pleasure of eating good cheese.

According to historians the first Gorgonzola to be produced in history dates back between the 9th and 12th century in the surroundings of Milan. In the early Middle Ages people didn’t use to pay much attention to the classification of cheeses as they were all referred at with the Latin word “caseus”; this name included that special cheese, veined with greenish mouldy. At that time no branch of learning could explain how that was possible, and for this reason, until the beginning of the 19th century people used to consider the process as something crossing the threshold of alchemy, like a magic or a miracle performed by nature that gave to the cheese that particular greenish nuance and an incomparable flavour.

Nonetheless, during the 16th century a new word, “stracchino”, had been coined in Lombardy. It referred to a kind of cheese produced after the cattle went down from the mountain pastures to the planes to recover from weariness; in fact, “stracco” means weary in dialect.

In the lowlands of Lombardy the “stracchino” started to be called “erborin”, a word meaning parsley and deriving from the local dialect, which well reminds of that greenish veining inside the cheese. This word had success and gradually became the label for a category of cheeses, the blue cheeses.
The migrations of dairymen’s families beyond the shores of the Ticino river introduced Piedmont to the production of Gorgonzola: this is how the manufacturing was shaped in Lombardy and Piedmont; both areas would later be officially ratified as original sites thanks to the establishment of the “Consorzio di tutela”, the Safeguard Consortium, in 1970.

Gorgonzola must be produced in the original sites using the milk gathered within the consortium area and there the cheese must follow the ageing process, be sliced and eventually sold. Shouldn’t this procedures be followed, the final product couldn’t be considered Gorgonzola.

The dairymen from Lombardy crossed the Ticino and arrived at Novara, in Piedmont. Novara was rich in water, herds and milk. The dairymen settled there and started to put into practice their craftsmanship.In a short time, Novara became the centre for the ageing of cheese, but nowadays (with some exceptions) it has lost that record, since most of the producers take care of that as well. Thus, Novara has became the capital of Gorgonzola supplying over 57% of cheese produced in one year in Italy.