The Loire: Cheeses

Mention of the Loire valley does not bring cheese to the mind of the average Frenchman, but in fact several popular cheeses come from this general area. On the spot, a fresh cheese called ‘crémets’ is eaten with sugar and cream or with fruit.

Touraine is a centre for goat cheese, with ‘Ste-Maure’ the favourite among half a dozen others. The tangy Ste-Maure is shaped in a long cylinder with a straw running through the centre and the best is farm produced, or ‘fermier’. ‘Olivet’, a cow cheese, is traditional to the Orléanais. There are two types: ‘olivet bleu’, which is not a blue cheese at all but has a bluish rind from aging in chalk caverns, and ‘olivet cendré’, sooty-black from maturing in ashes.