The making of Mont d’Or

With its snow capped mountains and beautiful meadows, the Jura is of course perfect for cows, and the region is rightly famed for its rather delicious cheeses, such as Comté, morbier and Mont d’Or.

Mont d’Or is easily recognised by its spruce strap wrapping, which is the last process in its production. Before this happens the cheeses are crammed into wooden boxes and left to mature for a few weeks. This allows various natural moulds to form, along with a slightly velvety, mottled outer skin, and the familiar rippled top: all perfectly edible. Once the cheese is aged, the spruce strips are then boiled to soften them, before being strapped around the cheeses ready to be sold.

All the local cheeses are made with the milk of the local dairy cow: the Montbéliarde, sometimes known as the ‘Pied rouge des montagnes’, or the red foot of the mountains. This breed was apparently chosen for their rich, high fat milk, and their ability to cope with the high altitude variations in temperature.

Mont d’Or is a truly seasonal cheese, and is only made between the 15th August and 15th March, when the cows come down the mountain from their high summer pastures. We got to see the cheese making process at a ‘fruiterie’, or cheese producer, who also had an excellent museum of their family history of cheese making going back three generations.

Inside the museum there are short films on all the manufacturing stages of cheese, both ancient and modern, and also a short film on the family business, with a man projected onto a mesh screen between family photos and old cheese making machinery. It’s a very engaging way of getting the story across.

Mont d'or is a delicious soft scoop cheese, one of the few cheeses in France that needs to be served with a spoon. Across the country it is often eaten hot, by baking it in the oven in the box.

How to bake Mont d’Or Cheese: the way I do it.

Preheat the oven to 180/200°C

Remove the lid and pop the box into an ovenproof dish, or onto a baking tray.

Cut a few slits in the cheese and pop some thinly sliced garlic into the holes, along with some fresh thyme or rosemary, black pepper and a few tablespoons of white wine.

Then wrap it in tin foil, and bake for about 15–20 minutes.

Careful when you remove it, it’s very hot and drippy! make sure it’s melted and gooey, stir it up a bit, and serve with a crusty baguette, and you might as well eothe rest of the wine. Yummy.