A nice local cheese

Le Curé Nantais is a local cheese made from cow’s milk. I had it for the first time at a Creperie where it was beautifully melted inside a galette along with sausages made with Muscadet white wine. Just wonderful.

I made a similarly exciting discovery one day at the market when I saw that they sold entire blocks of this very smooth, creamy, and “melty” cheese for a reasonable price. I don’t think the Curé Nantais is the most sophisticated of cheeses, but it is a cheese that locals are proud of because of its long history and extremely rustic and traditional roots that it maintains to this day.

According to the Cure Nantais website: http://www.curenantais.com/WEBSITE_2009/page_cure_01.html
The still small and family-owned (they limit production to 2000 cheeses a day and sell only in the Pays de la Loire cities) production site is located in Pornic – a small seaside town in the Pays de la Loire (the department that Nantes belongs to) eventhough the cheese was originally conceived and produced in 1880 à Saint-Julien-de-Concelles, East of Nantes.

The cheese is made with the same methods from its conception, using whole « raw milk » or what we know as non-pasteurized and non-homogenized milk which they collect twice a day… pendant l’aube et l’aurore- meaning sunset and sunrise. For at least one month, the cheeses are aged and routinely undergo salt water and Muscadet white wine washes which undoubtedly add to the flavor.