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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
There is a bank whose vault doesn’t hold gold but cheese. More than three hundred thousand wheels.
The Italian Credito Emiliano from Emilia-Romagna accepts wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano as collateral for small business loans. The practice has been in place since 1953. The warehouse is called Magazzino Generale Tagliate.
The total value of the stock is estimated at roughly one hundred sixty million euros. One wheel costs from nine hundred to two thousand five hundred dollars, depending on its aging.
And here’s the beauty of the scheme.
You can’t just put the collateral the bank took in a safe and forget it. Parmesan must mature, and the bank is obliged to care for it. But while it matures, it increases in value.
So it’s collateral that increases in price by itself while sitting in the bank. The cheesemaker doesn’t have to keep capital frozen in storage, and the bank receives security that grows better over time rather than worse.
For cheesemaking, where money is invested today and you can sell only in two years, this solved the industry’s main problem.
Now how to choose Parmesan, because three things decide everything.
We recommend looking for the Parmigiano Reggiano marking on the rind, applied as dots all the way around. It’s stamped on the wheel before aging, and it can’t be forged on a genuine cheese.
Second: age. Twenty-four months is the basic maturity; thirty-six months is a different cheese—saltier, crumbly, with a pronounced nutty tone. The little white crystals inside are not salt or defects; they are the amino acid tyrosine, a sign of proper aging.
Third: never throw away the rind. Toss it into soup, sauce, or stock; it gives up everything it accumulated over two years.
Store it wrapped in parchment, not plastic. Under plastic the cheese suffocates.
The most reliable asset is the one that works even when it lies idle.
💛Enjoy.
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