Langres

Appearance & taste

Langres is cylindrical to slightly frustum-shaped and has a hollow of at least 5 mm in the top, the “fontaine” (hollow) or “cuvette” (basin). It comes in three sizes: large, from a mould 16 to 20 cm in diameter, weighing 800 to 1,300 g; medium, from a mould of 9 to 10 cm, weighing 280 to 350 g; and small, from a mould of 7 to 8 cm, weighing 150 to 250 g.

The washed rind is smooth or slightly wrinkled and covered with a smear; in the ripened cheese it is golden yellow to reddish brown. The soft paste is white and turns cream-coloured during ripening. The dry matter is over 42 %. The specification mentions a strong, pronounced smell.

Production

At least 80 % of the dairy cows’ feed (as dry matter) comes from the area. The cows are on pasture for at least six months a year, with at least 20 ares of grassland per cow. In winter, green fodder makes up at least 30 % of the roughage, at least half of it as hay or dried grass. Concentrated feed is limited to an annual average of 7 kg per lactating cow per day.

Only cow’s milk from the area is used, neither concentrated nor reconstituted. The milk first ripens slowly so that lactic acid develops, and is then curdled over two and a half to five and a half hours; this gives the curd its lactic character. During draining the cheese may be turned at most twice, which forms the hollow in the top. During ripening of 15 to 21 days, depending on size, it is regularly rubbed with salt water. Milk production, cheesemaking and ripening take place in the area.

Origin & history

The area extends around the pastures of the Bassigny and the Langres plateau. It lies on a Jurassic layer with clay-limestone soils at 400 to 500 m. Mainly Simmental cattle, long customary there, are kept. Because grazing is not always possible on the dry plateau in summer or in the damp Bassigny, farms have traditionally stored large reserves of fodder.

Written records confirm that in the countryside around Langres cheese was drained and dried in moulds as early as the Middle Ages. A book by A. F. Pauriau from 1874 mentions a cheese called “Langres”. At that time it was made only on farms; 14 houses in the town of Langres bought the white cheese and had it ripened. Small cheeses tended to be eaten young, larger ones stored longer and sold further afield. Later, wholesalers bought directly in the villages and supplied Paris, Châlons, Bar-le-Duc, Nancy, the Corrèze and Allier departments and occasionally Geneva; according to the specification, the cheese reached its greatest renown at that time.

With the First World War, farm production began to decline, and this continued until the end of the 1940s; the dairies of the region turned to other kinds of cheese. Only in 1950 was artisanal production taken up again here and there. In 1981 the Langres cheesemakers’ association was founded, which sought a designation of origin from 1986.