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Mont-D’or, a sweet pleasure from Haut-Doubs

Boxes, boxes, and more boxes.Hundreds of boxes which, under the yellow light of the workshop, take golden reflections.Myriads of boxes like so many bulging chests, giving the visitor the feeling of entering an Ali Baba cheese cave which he can never overcome.

For a gourmet, exploring the Doubs cheese dairy, placed near Pontarlier, is experimenting with frustration at its highest degree.It is also to understand how much Mont-d’Or is a case apart in the world of dairy delights."First of all because it is a seasonal product manufactured only between August 15 and March 15," said Eric February, breeder and president of the Mont-D’or interprofessional union.

This big fellow directs his clear gaze through a workshop window, towards the snowy plains which surround the cheese dairy.The Montbéliardes, these cows with the elegant red pie dress which provide most of the milk used for Mont-D’or, are warm on the farms, and will not return to punctuate the meadows that in the spring.Without them, the mountainous territory of Haut-Doubs, weakly populated, offers panoramas full of emptiness."The Mont-D’or is due to very small structures and around 450 milk producers concentrated in a territory of only 20 kilometers by 40 kilometers, above 700 meters above sea level, enumerates Eric February.But what is really specific to this cheese is that it requires a large part of manual work.»»

Compared to many almost entirely mechanized cheese factories, that of Doubs looks like a hive.Thirty seasonal workers have joined the permanent employees who are busy in the workshop.Virtuoso hands are needed in all positions: to mold the cheeses, to turn them and turn them over during a minimum twelve day ripening.To put the large dough discs in slightly smaller boxes that will recreate on their fluffy surfaces of light folds reminiscent of those of the Plateaux du Massif Jurassien.But also to strap the cheeses.

Mont-d’or, un doux plaisir du Haut-Doubs

Each piece is indeed surrounded by a thin spruce strip, the conifers which dominates in the region and the only essence authorized by the PDO created in 1996 for the Mont-D’or.The strap prevents the mollasson from taking its ease too much, while giving it its special aroma.And these wood strips are themselves handcrafted by around thirty professionals in Haut-Doubs: wild boars.

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