Fingers: Why is Périgord cabécou so soft and creamy? – 20 minutes
- France is the country of cheese. It has so many that it is difficult to know the exact number. More than 1,000 assuredly, including 45 protected designations of origin.
- AT 20 minutes, we love cheese so we went to discover the cheeses of our eleven local editions.
- We take you behind the scenes of the production of Cabécou du Périgord, handcrafted by Nathalie Bonnamy, in Grignols in the Dordogne.
In a hilly and green corner of the countryside, the Bonnamy couple make cabécou, a generic term for “little goat’s cheese”, but not just any: the Périgord cabécou. While Patrice, 49, raises the 130 alpine goats chosen because they are “good dairy”, Nathalie, 51, is in charge of the factory of the famous little puck on their farm in Grignols. , in the south of the Dordogne.
She immediately specifies that it is made from “raw milk”, unlike industrial cabécou, which means monitoring the acidity of the milk during the manufacturing period. He must also assess the state of his curd so that the pucks have the right consistency and do not lose too much material during ripening. “The specifications for Cabécou du Périgord require five days of ripening, but that’s not enough, I usually do at least seven days”, specifies Nathalie Bonnamy.
A well-honed manufacturing process
Established since 1999 as breeders, they started making cabécou in 2010. Nathalie Bonnamy milks the goats early in the morning and stores the harvested milk in a curdling room for 24 hours. The sure gesture, she confesses to have taken advice from Elder for small details such as the measurement of salt. “I weighed it each time and it took me a while, now I have this small bowl which corresponds exactly to the dose I need for a large bowl of curd”, she appreciates.
Once the curd is salted and stirred, it is put in the form of pucks using a stainless steel jig. The cabécous, very fresh at this stage, are stored in a room at 20 degrees and 65% humidity, and Nathalie carefully turns them over using a rack. “The geotrichum (ripening ferment) must form on the surface of the pucks, which is what gives them this ivory color,” she points out, pointing to the cheeses. They will then be transferred to a more humid (90% humidity) and cooler (12 degrees) room for the final ripening phase.
Fed with local mowing
The goats that can be heard bleating from the ripening room wander regularly in the woods adjoining the Bonnamys’ property. They tear off the leaves within reach but are mainly fed on the mown grass that is brought to them in the goat barn. This is one of the criteria notified in the specifications of Cabécou du Périgord, stamped collective mark: 80% of the food given to the animals must come from Dordogne.
Nathalie Bonnamy sells her palets and other cheeses in a very short circuit: on two weekly markets located near her home but also at the Ruche qui dit oui and cagettes.net. With a production of approximately 35,000 liters per year, it also sells part of the milk to the nearby Picandine cheese dairy, which works for the Rians brand. She confides that it is especially the youngest and the tourists who melt for the cabécou, the old ones preferring the log of fresh cheese.
To complete their activity, the couple recently opened a gîte called la Chèvrerie, near their farm. Country atmosphere and bleating guaranteed in the background …