I had a gentleman at the cheese counter the other day who told me an amazing amount of times that he didn’t like “Rockefeller” cheese. After plenty of confusing minutes, I settled on the idea that he meant Roquefort cheese.                

Certainly this fellow wasn’t implying that there was a cheese named for the famous fossil fuel tycoon? Clearly he was speaking of the cheese that Pliny described in his writings as hailing from the mountainous region of France, close to the Mediterranean Sea…Roquefort-Sur-Soulzon.

The lore that follows this cheese is that a young shepherd girl enjoyed her lunch of cheese and bread one day in the caves of Cambalou. Leaving her lunch behind, to chase her flock perhaps, she found it a few weeks later when she returned to her favorite lunch spot and discovered what we cherish today, Roquefort.

Very simply, blue cheeses are a style of cheese that has had a mold introduced to the curd or the mold is abundant in the aging room/cave. After the cheese has been shaped and possibly cured, it is pierced to allow air to interact with the mold. The end result is the lovely green-blue veining that laces itself throughout the cheese. The most common molds used for blue cheese production are Penicillium roqueforti or Penicillium glaucom. Is this the same penicillin that Sir Alexander Fleming developed in 1928? Indeed our penicillium based molds do share the same familial line that birthed the ever-potent antibiotic, although the mold in our favorite blues harbor only a small amount of antibacterial mold compared to the dosage of your local chemist’s pill.

What is unique to the caves of Cambalou is the mold. The cheese makers would age rye bread in the same caves that they would ultimately age the cheese. After a few weeks of being in the caves, the bread would have been completely impregnated with this special mold. It was then ground to a fine powder and mixed into the curds before being hand ladled into the forms. At this point the cheeses would be pierced, returned to the caves and matured to perfection.

First American Billionaire…Classic French Sheep’s milk cheese? I see how easily confused you could be.