Produced by a single cheesemaker, Salvatore Passalacqua, using only milk from the pastures in the wild or semi-wild state of Castronovo di Sicilia and neighboring municipalities, Tuma persa has an interesting history. Around 1990 Raffaele Rubino, a well-known Neapolitan researcher, discovered a series of essays on dairy products written by Alberto Romolotti collected in a volume “Le vie del latte” published in 1936. Among the essays was one dedicated to the cheeses of Sicily in which the cheeses produced on the island that Romolotti had tasted during his lifetime were summarized. Among these, Rubino’s attention was drawn precisely to the Tuma persa, a cheese of which he had lost track. Romolotti had described the aroma and flavor of the Sicilian cheese as a mix of fruit and cooked milk, sweet taste and slightly spicy aftertaste. The peculiarity of this cheese convinced Salvatore to bring Tuma Persa back to life, following a meeting with Rubino that was followed by numerous attempts to faithfully reproduce the aroma and flavor described by Romolotti.
The cheese is the result of milking whole cow’s milk with the subsequent addition of kid rennet paste. It has an ochre-yellow rind, which is destined to turn dark after a blanket with oil and ground pepper. The flavor of Tuma persa fluctuates between sweet and spicy, a characteristic resulting from the aging process, without ever being salty, characterized by a long and aromatic aftertaste reminiscent of blue cheeses.