Countdown to Picos

[Bierzo Baggie]

2. The cheese.
I’ve always loved my cheese. It used to be just Cheddar but when in my late teens I discovered “abroad” I sampled blue cheese for the first time. It changed my life.

Picos de Europa produces some excellent blue cheeses. Cabrales is probably the most famous. You can find it in our local supermarket but then again in this globalized day and age you can even find Wallace and Gromit’s finest Wensleydale in our local supermarket. What you can’t find in our local supermarket is the “Picón”. This is an authentic collector’s item of a cheese and I’ve only ever seen it in the zone where it’s made. It might even be an illegal, extra strong bootleg cheese.. I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s been produced for generations by the shepherds of the high mountain pastures of Andara, the eastern most massif of Picos.

And to my untrained eyes it’s not actually that blue.. its more a greenish brown colour which might be disconcerting for the uninitiated. The colour is a result of its elaboration. The Picón, like Cabrales, uses cow, goat and sheep milk, mixed in varying quantities and left to mature between 2 and 4 months in mountain caves. Here, temperature and humidity factors interact to encourage a mould similar to penicillin which will give the cheese its “distinctive” taste. Mmmmmm.

The Picos race will end in Sotres. If you carry on upwards along a road which didn’t even exist until the early 90s, you will reach the isolated village of Treviso. This is where the Picón, the mother of all greenish-blue cheeses, is still made in the traditional way. Some years ago I bought one, took it home and stank the kitchen out. Mrs BB ordered me to eat it or chuck it. Miguel mushroom, ever interested in fungal related matters, promptly came around and helped me polish off the offending article. One of my reasons for running 60 mountainous kms across the Picos de Europa is to reacquaint myself with the blue veined beast.

The myth that the Picón cheese matures encrusted with cow-dung is unfounded although many people believe it including Mrs BB.

Images of the Picón on the internet are surprisingly hard to come by. This might be one.. although it looks a bit too blue to me..