Travel Tip: Visit a Cheese Shop When in Paris, France

When I (David) was in college, I had the great privilege to spend a month of study abroad each year.

We were tasked with planning a detailed course of study and then given Eurail Passes to travel around Europe for 30-days.  It was eye-opening, educational, and great fun!

As a poor college student, one of the things I quickly learned is that I could pick up a loaf of bread, some fabulous cheese, and for hardly any money at all, nosh on this for breakfast and lunch.

Fast forward 40 years and the same is still true. When you’re in Paris, you simply must grab a French baguette, some cheese, and perhaps even some foie gras and have yourself a picnic.

Last week, I wrote this article to share with you where to find some fabulous meats and foie gras in Paris.

And in this article, I’m going to focus on the cheese.

As I mentioned in the article linked above, we were enjoying a private Foodie Tour with our friends from Context Travel Tours.  And after getting the meats for our little picnic, we were then off to the cheese shop.

Here is our guide Laurie Nourrigat helping us understand French cheeses and picking a few samples for our picnic.  As you can see, she already has our meats in the bag from Maison Guyard.

The cheese shop that Laurie took us to was Androuet, a French cheesemaker since 1909.  Below is the shopkeeper slicing one of four different kinds of cheese we were to sample. My favorite cheese turned out to be an ash-covered goat cheese.

Evidently, the cheesemakers of yesteryear would use ash to preserve their cheeses. But today, the tradition continues as the ash (many times vegetable ash or burned grapevine prunings) is found to neutralize the acidic surface of fresh goat cheeses.  I know it sounds yucky, but it’s actually very, very good.

Are you salivating yet?  I am.  In fact, I just did a Google search to see where I might find some authentic craft cheeses here in Scottsdale.  🙂

Well, that’s it for the cheese shop.  Our next stop on tour was a local bread shop where we would have our little picnic.  Stay tuned.

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