Gamonéu

Appearance & taste

Gamonéu is cylindrical with a flat top and bottom, 6 to 18 cm high, 10 to 35 cm in diameter and weighing 0.5 to 10 kg. Smoking gives the rind a reddish-brown colour, which can take on reddish, greenish or bluish tones when fungi settle on it during ripening in caves. The interior is white or slightly yellowish and may show some bluish-green Penicillium mould at the edges. The paste is hard or semi-hard, firm and crumbly, breaks up slightly when cut and has small, irregular holes. The cheese contains at least 45 % fat in dry matter.

The smell is clean and penetrating, with mild smoky aromas, and grows stronger with ripeness. On the palate the cheese shows mild smoke and a slight spiciness, is buttery in the mouth and has a long, nutty finish, sometimes of hazelnut. Cheese made in summer on the mountain pastures of Cangas de Onís and Onís in small dairies may be called “del Puerto” (from the mountain pass); it is made from a mixture of the milk of at least two of the three species, with at most 90 % cow’s milk and at least 5 % each of sheep’s or goat’s milk if these are used.

Production

The animals graze all year round and are also given freshly cut grass and hay from their own farm. Feed from outside the area is allowed only in exceptional cases, for instance during lactation or when feed is scarce, and may make up at most 50 % of the dry matter in a year. Permitted are cows of the Frisona, Asturiana de los Valles, Asturiana de la Montaña, Parda, Parda de Montaña, Fleckvieh and Jersey breeds, sheep of the Latxa, Carranzana, East Friesian milk sheep and Assaf breeds and several goat breeds, including Alpine, Pyrenean goat, Saanen and Bermeya, each with their crosses.

Only raw milk is used. The milk coagulates, the curd is cut, filled into moulds and salted. The cheese is then smoked and ripens; only fungi and yeasts that occur naturally in the ripening rooms are involved, above all Penicillium. Milk production, cheesemaking, ripening and portioning take place in the area, and every cheese carries markings on the rind and a numbered control label.

Origin & history

Cangas de Onís and Onís cover large parts of the Cornión, the western massif of the Picos de Europa, with differences in altitude from 80 m on the river Sella to 2,648 m at Torre Cerredo. In the valleys lie flat meadows that provide hay for the winter; in the high karst areas with rock faces, sinkholes and caves lie the mountain pastures, where the livestock stays from spring until the first snow. The climate is maritime, with 1,200 mm of rainfall at lower levels and up to 2,000 mm at altitude, often with thick fog in summer. On the high pastures grows above all Festuca burnatii, a grass endemic to Cantabria, and in snowy hollows matgrass.

According to the specification, the origins of the cheese go back at least to the 17th century: a letter to King Philip IV from 1641 about pasture farming calls it the food of the “poor of the municipality”. The dictionary of Pascual Madoz describes the cheese as a staple food and the mixed herds of cows, sheep and goats whose owners spent the summer on the mountain pastures. Because the area was cut off from the markets, the herders made their milk into cheese themselves. In 1918 the Parque Nacional de la Montaña de Covadonga was founded here as Spain’s first national park.