Hey there, cheese lovers! Let’s talk about the origins of a particular kind of cheese. A cheese for the acquired taste, if you will. That’s right, it’s time to talk about blue cheese.
Listen, love it or hate it, you can’t deny blue cheese is a fine example of cheesemaking ingenuity. Whoever in the world thought that eating moldy cheese was a good idea, we’re grateful for their courage… and for spreading the word around.
Want to know more about blue cheese’s origin? As always, we’ve got you covered. We’ve scoured the Internet for facts and rounded up everything you need to know about where blue cheese comes from and how old the recipe for it is. If that’s what you came here to find out, bring your appetite and read on!
Where Does Blue Cheese Come From?
The origins of blue cheese are the subject of heated debate in the foodie community. And, to make a long story short, this is probably one of those questions that will never be answered, at least not with certainty.
The story has it that several centuries ago, a shepherd in Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, a tiny commune in southern France with a present-day population of barely 600 (2015 census), forgot his lunch — a piece or two of bread and a slice of homemade cheese — in a cave.
The bread went moldy, the cheese picked up the mold, and when our shepherd discovered the cheese, it had a moldy rind with blue and green veins running all the way to the middle. He must have been hungry because he clearly tried it. And it must have been delicious since we still make blue cheese to this day.
However, old French texts contradict this story. They claim that Penicilum roqueforti, the mold spores that make Roquefort what it is, would contaminate the cheese from within, and not from without. And so does modern science, which has proved that P. roqueforti molds don’t belong to the family of food-spoiling molds. In other words, we’ll never truly know.
Bottom Line
Well, fellow cheese lovers, there you have it. Now you know where blue cheese comes from — and what its origin story is. Since you read this far, we’d like to take the opportunity to say thanks for stopping by Gionado’s!
We hope you had a good time reading this article about the origin of blue cheese. If you want to share some of your favorite facts about blue cheese’s story with the rest of this article’s readers, or have a question that it didn’t really answer, we invite you to leave a reply below.
