This Pyrénées Brebis is made in Helette, in the Basque region of the Pyrénées, and shares much of the history of an Ossau Iraty recipe.
Ossau Iraty has a long history and is thought to be one of the first cheeses ever made. The story goes that Greek God Apollo had a shepherd son named Aristee who turned milk from his sheep into this cheese. In reality, this cheese wasn’t first created by a God, but does follow traditions and a recipe that dates back around 3000 years. Ossau Iraty thus pre-dates the English alphabet.
The recipe for Pyrenees Brebis unifies the farming traditions of two staunch adversaries of the Pyrenees, the Basques and Bearnais. Whilst the inhabitants remain proudly independent of each other, this cheese conjoins their milks and production techniques. Sheep farming existed in these high peaks for many centuries, but the isolation and hardship of shepherding there saw the profession undergo a decline in the last 100 years.
The Agour creamery, set up in the late 19th Century by the grandfather of the Peio family, are a local co-operative who collect the milks of the mountain farmers and make the cheese themselves, lightening the work load of the herdsmen and ensuring the on-going legacy of the recipe.
Crucially, the cheese leaves the AOP zone at just 1week old and is matured by Jules Mons and the team at Tunnel de la Collonge, a disused railway tunnel in the village of Ambierle which houses the majority of Mons France's hard cheeses. The resulting cheese shares many of the characteristics of Ossau Iraty but goes by a different name - Pyrénées Brebis.
The ewes are outdoor reared, eating wild grasses, and the cheese is made within a few miles of the mountainous pastures, so there are very few food miles involved in production.
