Cheese in the Touraine Loire Valley

In our experience travellers to the Loire Valley are divided into two sorts of people. The first are already fans of goats cheese. The others are people who have tried goats cheese elsewhere, and think they don’t like goats cheese. Once they try any of the Loire Valley cheeses they discover a new food that they love, and from then on are hooked.

Sainte Maure de Touraine goats cheese, showing the organic rye straw inserted down the middle.

All of the traditional cheeses in the Loire Valley are goats milk cheeses(usually referred to as ‘chevre’ in French) and the area is known for them. The biggest selling goats cheeses in France come from here and there are protections in place to ensure the product is what the label says it is. The most popular and best known Loire Valley cheese, AOC Sainte Maure de Touraine, is so commercially valuable that truckloads of it are not in frequently stolen, and there have been cases of fake Sainte Maure cheeses on the market. For all that, an individual goats cheese bought locally from a producer or local retailer is entirely affordable, usually being about €3 - €5 a piece.

These Sainte Maure de Touraine cheese logs have been coated by hand with salt and ash.

France uses a system of categorising and certifying high value artisanal food products known as the Appellation d’Origine Controllée (Controlled Origin Certification) or AOC for short. There are five of these for the farmhouse Loire Valley cheeses: Sainte Maure de Touraine, Selles sur Cher, Chavignol, Valençay and Pouligny Saint Pierre. Each of them comes from within different geographical boundaries and they are different shapes. Sainte Maure de Touraine is a tapered log shape with a rye straw inserted down the middle (if it doesn’t have a straw with the producer’s name lasered on to it, it is not the real thing). Selles sur Cher is a disk. Chavignol a puck (known as ‘crottins’ in French, which means ‘droppings’ - in the scatalogical sense!). Valençay and Pouligny Saint Pierre are truncated pyramids.

Each producer must be making cheese from a single herd of goats of a designated breed, on their own farm premises and growing fodder for the goats on the farm. Chavignol is the biggest seller in terms of numbers of cheeses, but that is because they are small. Sainte Maure de Touraine is the biggest seller in terms of weight, closely followed by Selles sur Cher. Pouligny Saint Pierre production is very small and so it is by far the lowest in terms of sales.

Sainte Maure de Touraine cheeses draining in their moulds.

The shapes are important and contribute greatly to the taste of the cheese. The surface area differs depending on the shape and it means the cheeses dry out and mature at a different rate and in different ways. All these cheeses are coated in ash and salt which helps to protect the cheese against bad bacteria and undesirable fungi. All of them are made from raw milk too, which my cheesemaker friends tell me is much safer than using pasterised milk. They say that pasturising kills not just bad microbes, but protective ones too, and that in cheesemaking you are much better off working with the natural processes than trying to over control them. In the end you will get a much tastier and more distinctive product, which of course is what they are aiming for.

Alpine breed dairy goats being milked.

 

Our village is part of the Sainte Maure de Touraine appellation, but we have easy access to nearby producers of Selles sur Cher, Valençay and Pouligny Saint Pierre, all within 20 kilometres of home. Our personal favourite is Valençay, but the one we eat most often, because it is delivered to our door by the producer, is Sainte Maure de Touraine. 

 

Selles sur Cher cheeses displayed on traditional organic rye straw mats.

Sainte Maure de Touraine offered with Vouvray wine at a tasting.

Crottins de Chavignol, with the traditional ceramic moulds on the right.

Cheesemakers making Selles sur Cher.

Cheesemaker showing a maturing Selles sur Cher.

Valencay, with the top cut off its pyramid supposedly so as not to remind Napoleon of defeat in Egypt.

 

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