The French Cheese I'm Loving Right Now - la Manigodine

If Reblochon and Mont d’Or had a baby, their little bundle of joy would be la Manigodine

Manigod, a small town of around 1000 inhabitants in the French Alps, is home to about 20 Reblochon cheese producers. Two of them are farmers Guillaume and Murielle Burgat, a couple who split their cheese making duties - Guillaume tends to their cows both at the farm and high in the Alps during the summer grazing months, and Murielle focuses her energy on the cheesemaking. 

About 14 years ago the couple collaborated with a local affineur, Joseph Paccard, to create la Manigodine, a larger format and longer aged version of Reblochon, which is named for the ‘women of Manigod,’ paying homage to the women cheesemakers of the region.

This superb, aromatic Alpine cheese is wrapped in a strip of spruce bark like Mont d’Or and smear ripened like Reblochon. The result is a cheese with a luscious, creamy center offering flavors of raw cream, butter, hazelnuts and fermented fruit, while on the nose there are notes of smoky pine and fresh hay.

Facts: La Manigodine is an unpasteurized cow’s milk cheese from the Haute-Savoie, made with the milk of the Abondance, Montbéliarde and Tarine breeds. It’s aged at high humidity and washed repeatedly in salt water for several weeks by devoted cheese affineurs (experts trained in ripening cheese).