Cheese platter is an essential holiday meal moment and an invitation to discover new local flavors. Refined, from cow, goat or sheep's milk: local cheeses proudly claim their quality, their origins and their differences. Let's go on a 5 step cheese discovery tour through France.
MAROILLES FAUQUET: the little guy from the North with a strong character
The only PDO in northern France, Maroilles is a cheese of strong character made from cow's milk, in the heart of Thiérache, by the Fauquet master cheese makers. One of its main features is that it is washed regularly, in a maturing cellar, with salt water.
Objective? Foster the development of the "ferment of red" which helps to give all its flavor to its very dense paste.
EPOISSES BERTHAUT: a cheese from the Burgundy region
Burgundy is the Epoisses Berthaut terroir. Made from local cows’ milk (with breeds like Brune, Simmental Française, Montbéliarde), this characterful PDO cheese, with a powerful aroma and soft and subtle flavors, is matured for five weeks and rubbed with Marc de Bourgogne.
Its rind is then slowly adorned with a beautiful natural orange-red color.
ROCHEBARON: made in Haute-Loire French Department
This soft blue-veined cow's milk cheese, made in Beauzac in the Haute-Loire, is covered with a natural rind lightly ashed with vegetable charcoal. Rochebaron offers a delicate creamy taste, slightly blue-like, with a fruity flavor and sweet terroir aromas.
It is the result of a unique experience that combines fine blue molds in a soft paste.
ROQUEFORT PAPILLON: blue in the veins
Further south, in the village of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, in the department of Aveyron, the Papillon cheese plant passionately perpetuates centuries-old know-how to make Roquefort DPO, made from sheep's milk. How? Thanks to the preparation by an artisan baker of rye bread, cooked in the bakehouse of the cheese factory, in which the famous Penicillium roqueforti is then cultivated.
The cheeses are matured in the natural cellars of the Roquefort-sur-Soulzon village, for a minimum of 14 days.
ETORKI: a typical Basque cheese
Made in Mauléon, in the heart of the Basque Country, Etorki sheep cheese is one of the best-known heirs and ambassadors of the thousand-year-old tradition of Basque cheeses.
Its ripening, controlled by master cheese makers for more than two months, gives it its unique, long and distinctive taste.