Omnivore - High heaven: History, pairings and the glorious stink of blue cheese

Spicy, creamy, rich, crumbly, earthy and sometimes sweet. Blue cheese comes in all sorts of textures and flavors. However, they all have one thing in common: mold. Mold is growing and thriving inside these chunks of curdled wonder. It must have been a brave person (or a hungry one) that first decided to eat the moldy cheese, but we’re all glad he or she did.

Penicillium roqueforti and penicillium glaucum are the two most widely used types of blue cheese molds. The first is from France and where Roquefort takes its name and the second is Italian and used in the Gorgonzolas. Well, how did it get there?

The cheese lore goes that a Frenchman left his rye bread in the cheese caves of Cambalou, France, and the bread began to mold. Being that the caves were a nice 58 degrees with plenty of fresh air from the naturally occurring vents and the cheese was good and moist, the mold-growing trifecta was achieved. Voila! Roquefort was born. Today the penicillium roqueforti is still derived from bread that’s made from rye harvested on the Levezou Plateau just north of the Pyrenees Mountains.