For the second installment of our cheese of the week blog post, we are going to discuss two different cheeses. We bought these at the farmer's market on Boulevard Raspail in Paris.
The first cheese was Langres. It became an AOC cheese in 1991 and is a cow's milk cheese from the Champagne region of France. It has an almost unnatural looking orange rind and a very pungent scent, but we were told by the fromager that it smells stronger than it tastes (more on that in a moment).
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| A whole lotta Langres |
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| A map highlighting the Champagne region of France |
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| Our Langres |
So our evaluation of the Langres was mixed. Contrary to what we were told, it did have a very strong flavor. The cheese has a really nice, creamy texture, but you can almost taste the grass that the cow was eating and the cheese had a very sharp, bitter bite to it. Caroline and I were both a little turned-off at first, but on my second go-around, I started to appreciate it a bit more and when I was picking at it the next day, I was really starting to enjoy it. It had such a raw, natural flavor, unlike anything I had ever tasted. Caroline on the other hand, never really acquired a taste for it.
The second cheese we tried was Chabichou du Poitou. This is a more traditional goat milk's cheese and in our opinion was one of the best goat cheeses we've ever had. Chabichou du Poitou is an unpasteurized cheese from the Poitou-Charentes region of France and is a very young cheese, typically aged only 10-20 days. The region has a long, traditional history of goat-herding that dates back to the 8th century when many muslim "Saracens" lived in the area. Supposedly, the word Chabichou is a derivation of the arabic word for goat, Cheblis. The cheese was given protected AOC status in 1990 and more information can be found on the Chabichou website at http://www.chabichou-du-poitou.eu/
Our personal experience with the cheese was very positive as noted above. It was almost the perfect texture for a goat cheese. It is firm, but creamy and gives you that great feeling when you first stick your knife into it. As for the flavor, it has a relatively mild flavor, but is extremely balanced and instantly recognizable as a goat cheese. Overall, we felt that it had a very sweet finish. I'm sure it would have been great with a little bit of honey.
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| The Poitou-Charentes Region of France |
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| Our perfect piece of Chabichou du Poitou |
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