Montboissie Cheese Review

I enjoy the way that cheese can provide a powerful eating experience without much investment – not in the way that Pop Rocks would, but in the sense of rewarding an attentive sense of taste, focusing the the mind on what’s happening as a cheese moves through the mouth. Last night, I picked up a cut of Montboissie in the hopes that the interesting character of the cheese would translate into something good to eat.

The cheese looks interesting, like a light quartz crystal with a black vein of impurity running through it. It’s the impurity, and not the cheese, that grabs attention. That vein is made of “edible ash”, which is also described as “vegetable ash”.

Ash was traditionally used as a preservative on the outside of a cheese. The ash from a fire was used, and added flavor to the cheese, but vegetable ash is mostly tasteless. Vegetable ash is just dried processed vegetables – kind of like a hot dog puree of the vegetarian world. The ash is placed in Montboissie in order to provide visual attention, giving eaters a cue that there will be something special about the cheese.

Is there? The taste of Montboissie is buttery and rather unsophisticated, with only a slight sharpening to it. Some people claim that adding a vegetable ash to a cheese can help it ripen, but the Montboissie I tasted wasn’t very ripe. Maybe I’m just not enough of an ash connoisseur, and that’s why I don’t value its contribution.

The personality of this cheese is like that of someone who books a music hall for a concert, and sells tickets, but performance night only sings two notes before walking off the stage.

My wife’s comment was, “This cheese isn’t bad if you can eat it fast.”

Montboissie is a semi-soft French cheese, on the brie side of cheddar. The texture is profoundly smooth, like a perfect custard that holds together more in the mouth than a custard could. That smoothness makes eating the cheese flat, like how flat water is flat. That flatness should allow tastes to come through.