MORE ABOUT THAT POLENTA

This is Rifugio Scotoni, the little mountainside hut I mentioned in my Dolomites story in this month's Bon Appétit, and this is the polenta at Scotoni, the best polenta in the world. If you are some other polenta, really it's time to pack it in, give up, go home and just be happy being cornmeal and get a job being a taco or at the bottom of an english muffin. This is the polenta elite and you don't have what it takes. And what it takes apparently is a lot of cheese. The cook here sees polenta as primarily a cheese delivery system. He takes three local cheeses—Fontina, Schiz and Dobbiaco—and folds them into the polenta and flips and turns it and keeps working the stuff until as, as I say in the story, he somehow manages to "elevate the humble polenta to a many-textured thing of complex, creamy, grainy, crisp-edged, gooey-but-sturdy wonder. The magic polenta sits next to a pork sausage, more German or Austrian than Italian, split down the middle and grilled—simple, salty, good. This is fortifying food that cries out for its own classification in the Michelin Guide: Worth Climbing a Mountain For."
(Whole story is HERE)