Hervé Mons’ signature dish for Lafont

It blends in well with the landscape. Imposing, with a raw appearance, the Fourme de Montbrison with its cylindrical and monolithic shape reminds us of the rocks that make up the wild scenery of the Hautes-Chaumes plateau.
From a distance, its terracotta-colored crust could cast doubt, is it an earthenware pot?
It is for its rustic and ancestral side that Hervé Mons chose it when Lafont asked him to create a signature dish. “You have to say it the way you mean it, there are different ways to interpret our business.
You can see yourself as a chef and work a product into a recipe, why not, but I am more inclined to leave the cheese in its raw state as nature gave it to me.
I didn’t feel like making a sophisticated recipe with arabesques, even though the Fourme de Montbrison is an emblematic product next to my home”, admits the cheesemaker who prefers to invite people to come and see his land, to meet the people, the farm, then the artisanal cheese factory and the cellar where the cheeses are stored like big books in a library.

It evokes the history of this cheese whose first traces go back to the year 900, one would have found in a chapel of Forez an angular stone in the shape of fourme.
The technique of manufacture made with the means of the edge seems to coincide with the time and the landscape.
On the arid plateaus of the Haut-Forez and at the Béal pass which culminates at 1,390 meters, trees are non-existent.
According to Hervé Mons, the ancients had developed a method of production without cooking, as they had no wood to produce the energy necessary to cook the curd, unlike the wooded regions of the Jura and the Alps where Comté or Gruyère cheese is made.