Blue cheese

Melt behaviour

Softens and releases strong flavour rather than stretching

Used in small crumbled amounts; large quantities can dominate the whole pizza, in a domestic oven as much as any other

Storage and preparation

Best crumbled and used sparingly, balanced with a sweet element such as fig or honey

Common problems

• Used generously rather than as an accent, its high salt and strong pungency overwhelm every other topping
• Without a sweet counterpart (fig, honey), its sharpness can read as one-dimensionally bitter rather than complex

Substitutions

• goats-cheese for a milder, tangier alternative

Styles using this cheese

• Pizza contemporaneaModern compatibleLimited evidence

  A pungent, non-traditional addition in keeping with this movement's willingness to pair Neapolitan fundamentals with ingredients well outside the classic canon.

Blends featuring this cheese

Governed cheese blends (Mega Sprint 6) name the role each cheese plays rather than declaring one universal best combination — see each blend’s compromise before assuming it fits every context.

• Contemporary fig-and-blue finishing blend

  Role here: Finishing cheese (a light scatter, crumbled rather than shredded)

  Fontina carries the melt while a light, crumbled scatter of blue cheese provides a deliberately assertive finishing accent, traditionally paired with fig.

  Compromise: Blue cheese's pungency means this blend reads as a distinctly assertive, adult flavour profile — it is a finishing accent, not a base replacement, and increasing its share to behave like a normal melting cheese would overwhelm the pizza rather than simply adding more cheese flavour.

Evidence

Blue cheese used sparingly and balanced with a sweet or fruit element is well-established contemporary pizza practice.

No external sources attached to this specific claim beyond editorial synthesis.

History and cultural context

Gorgonzola, one of the world's oldest blue-veined cheeses, is traditionally dated to around the 9th century in Lombardy, Italy, and takes its name from the town of Gorgonzola near Milan — though, as with many centuries-old foods, its precise founding location is contested among several nearby Lombard towns, and a popular tale attributing its discovery to a cheesemaker distracted by a romantic tryst who forgot a vat of curds overnight is a widely repeated legend, not a documented event.

Traditional regions: Lombardy, Italy, Piedmont, Italy

Used internationally as a strong-flavoured finishing cheese on pizza, either as Italian Gorgonzola specifically or under the more generic international term 'blue cheese' for any similarly blue-mould-ripened cheese from any country.

• The Oxford Companion to Food — Oxford University Press