In the world of cheese, pyramids normally don’t speak of exotic places but of comfy, cozy ones like the Parc naturel de la Brenne stretching in the middle of nowhere, not far from France’s geographic center that is. I haven’t been there in person, so I can’t tell whether the descriptions are true that this was a “land of a thousand ponds”. What I can say is that the park gives home to the smallest Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée of French […]

Categories: Cheese University, France, good food • Tags: Cheese, Food, France

Here comes another high representative of the rustic Auvergne region, I very much like the description of its smell by my colleagues from the Eyewitness Companions who call it “old, the smell of a dark and humid cellar, of rye straw, and of mould”. The then Marshal of France, Henri de La Ferté-Sennecterre, a native from Auvergne, brought it to the royal table of Louis XIV in the 17th century (amongst other cheeses from his home country) – and it has […]

Categories: Cheese University, France, good food • Tags: Cheese, Food, France

Today’s cheese is made south of Troyes, not too far from Paris after all, I very much like the Eyewitness Companions’ judgement that it “melts in the mouth like light snow”. That is true, actually, it is a cheese only poets could accurately describe given its many astounding features and flavors and textures. A native from Burgundy and the Champagne region, it’s a grand old French classic cheese with a long, long history. Chronicles from 1362 mention it first and […]

Categories: Cheese University, France, good food • Tags: Cheese, Food, France

In the year of the Lord 1381, when the conclave was sitting in Avignon to elect a new pope, the clerics ordered 15 lumps of this cheese, made high up in the Savoy mountains. It was already famous back then, imagine, a dairy product from the alps with a history of more than 300 years – which means that we today talk about a cheese with origins dating back over a thousand years. Louis XIV, the splendid “sun king” was […]

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France’s Ardèche and Drôme regions are so breathtakingly beautiful that they both deserved an entry in one of these guides listing “1000 places to see before you die”. They give home to culinary sensations as well (of course) and today’s cheese is only one of them. Its name used to be a generic term for this kind of disc-shaped goat cheese, there might be a linguistic link to the French word piquer (meaning “biting” or “stinging”) because in the old […]

Categories: Cheese University, France, good food • Tags: Cheese, Food, France

This cheese has come a long, long way, it is fair to assume that it was already made and sold back in the Middle Ages, in the backward villages of lovely Normandy. It is in fact mentioned in documents published in 1560 and 1588, a square thing, strong and spicy, it used to have a washed rind, a croûte lavée, displaying flashy orange colours. Nowadays, producers have modified their procedures, there’s an argument about it, but there’s still only one […]

Categories: Cheese University, France, good food • Tags: Cheese, Food, France

Maybe I write this a little bit too often but the cheese presented today is again one of my favorites. It’s a subtle, soft, soothing yet powerful dairy product, a real character coming from beautiful Burgundy. The colour – flashy orange as you can see in the picture – is misleading in the end. It makes you think of strong tastes, of salty, beastly pleasures but this cheese is not one of those rural hammers. On the contrary, its elegance […]

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The Loire valley has offered quite a few fine products to the world and our today’s cheese is one of them. A native of the beautiful region called Sancerrois, it calls villages like Amigny, Asnières-sur-Sancerre, Bue, Champlin or Verdigny its home. In a man’s world you’d call it a short guy, displaying a diameter of hardly 6 cm and a height of around 3.5 cm, weighing only 60 grams. Small but powerful, that’s what you should call the Crottin de […]

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Here’s to a fat guy in every respect: the entire cylindrical pieces weigh up to 6 kilograms and the ivory coloured pâte contains at least 50 percent of matière grasse, in other words: fat, and so I guess it’s what Americans would call a devilish sin (or even a threat to homeland security). To French people and other cheese lovers it’s one of the rare, expensive yet popular AOC products made of sheep’s milk, a native from the Béarn and Basque […]

Categories: Cheese University, France, good food • Tags: Cheese, Food, France