Cheesemaker: Various
Region: France, Haut-Savoie
Milk: cows
Pasteurisation: no
Vegetarian: no
Most iconic cheeses are many hundreds of years old. Reblochon is a (relative) newcomer, first created in the 13th century, but kept a carefully hidden secret for centuries...
In the 12th and 13th centuries, French farmers and makers were taxed based on the production of their farms; how much wheat from their fields or how much milk from their cattle. The dairy farmers of the Savoyarde region came up with a simple plan to reduce the burden of their taxation - they would partially milk their cattle in the morning, leaving a small amount of milk left in the udder. Once the tax man had made his count of their produce, they would bring the cattle back in and finish the milking. Whilst the amount of milk obtained this way was small, it was richer and creamier than the earlier milking, and was perfect to create small, soft cheeses that would mature quickly and could be easily hidden from view!This continued until the laws around taxation changed, when Reblochon could finally be produced openly.
Soft but usually creamy rather than oozing, with a sweetness to the supple paste and a little barnyard-y funk on the peachy rind. Every Reblochon will have a red or green disc embedded in the rind (made from caesin, the protein found in milk, and entirely edible) - red denotes a laitier produced cheese whilst a green disc is a cheese made on a farm, the true Reblochon Fermier.
Wonderful with rich, fruity ales or in utterly addictive Tartiflette!
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