Spain’s Catalonia region has a noble and diverse cheesemaking legacy, with unique cheeses ranging from mató, a cottage cheese often drizzled with honey and eaten at dessert, to tupí, a product made from leftover bits of cheese that have been fermented in a clay pot with booze.
Barcelona was largely absent from this legacy until 2019, when Italian former veterinarian and self-professed “super lover of cheese” Francesco Cerutti opened Pinullet. Claiming to be the only cheesemaker in Barcelona, Cerutti uses organic milk to produce as many as nine different varieties of cheese right in the city center.
Every Monday, Cerutti receives a shipment of 1,000 liters of raw milk from a farm with three cows in Cardadeu, a village 40 kilometers northeast of Barcelona. Come Tuesday, the largely self-taught cheesemaker might turn this into a fresh cheese such as queso fresco, a couple Italian-style pasteurized cheeses such as mozzarella or ricotta, and three to four raw milk aged French-style cheeses such as a Camembert- or a Tomme-style cheese. He also produces yogurt and cheeses seasoned with ingredients ranging from truffles to chilies.
Cerutti’s so-called “cheese laboratory” spans a workroom, refrigerators for aging cheese, and a shopfront, where he also sells a few bottles of wine and other products, in addition to those cheeses. These days, he sells the bulk of what he produces to local restaurants.
