Jeannine & Roger's French Cheese Odyssey

Le Puy-en-Velay - 22nd June

Le Puy-en-Velay is situated between two volcanic hills, which makes for an extraordinary natural landscape, however warm air and high peaks means more thunder storms. Between rain showers and the roar of thunder, we did however manage to go out for food and geocaching. Basically not much else happened so today’s post is based on what we have learned about the area so far.

Essence of France Photo Challenge No.25 - Volcanoes. Apparently there are 450 dormant volcanoes in the Auvergne region and of those 80 are in the Chaine des Puys. We drove through the National Park of Volcanoes yesterday and took this picture of three volcano tops; some have rounded surfaces as they are formed from fluid lava that spread instead of building up.

The lower part of the volcanoes surprisingly have grass growing on them. It is this surface that helps generate good quality milk production for making the local Salers and Cantal cheese. The Salers cattle feed on the rich pastures which are a product of the land and the springs of natural water, the cheese produced from the cow’s milk tastes of the grasses, herbs and flowers it fed on.

In years past the volcanic stone of granite and basalt was used to build burons (small stone huts) for the production of cheese as it would have been made onsite where the herd was grazing. The caves formed by the volcanoes were used by the cheese makers to mature the cheese within them.

Cheese Experience No.62 - Cantal and Salers As part of our cheese tasting session yesterday we were given 4 Cantal cheeses of different maturity to taste. The youngest was very salty and the oldest, was closer to NZs mild cheese. Another shopper tried to talk us into the Salers brand which had matured for 18 months, and somewhere our request for Cantal got lost in translation and we ended up with the Prestige of the region, the Salers product that can only be made from the milk of hand milked Salers cows. While in our enforced weather locked down I consumed a fair bit on crackers, both on bread and on its own.
The brown crust is all part of its aging.

Le Puy is also a popular destination for Pilgrims walking the Camino, with over 30,000 pilgrims visiting per year.
Some of them start their walk here, ‘Chemin de Puy”, and therefore the town has its fair share of hostels and souvenir shops selling Camino paraphernalia.

The Le Puy En Velay sign in town as shown in the header picture shows their interpretation of the Camino scallop shell in recognition of the significance of the walk to this area.

Le Puy also has a garden festival theme going on; they have flowers hanging as bunting in the streets and large flowers in pots outside shops.
The following photo is a herb and vegetable garden in the one of the town squares, the grass is fake.

On our stroll this evening we came upon this café that had lots of games and puzzles on the shelves. It is a café for socialising, playing board games and doing puzzles, no computers or TVs. There were tables full with younger people having actual conversations and not living in a virtual world.