Reblochon AOP, the heart of a tartiflette: what to know before you order one

A tartiflette stands or falls on a single ingredient. Get the Reblochon wrong and no amount of oven time will rescue the dish.

A medieval tax dodge

The name comes from the Savoyard dialect verb reblocher, which means to pinch the cow’s udder a second time. In the thirteenth century, farmers in the Thônes and Grand-Bornand valleys paid the owner of the mountain pasture a fee calculated on the volume of milk they produced.

They therefore took to milking their cows only partly while the inspector watched, then finishing the job once he had left. That second milk, far richer in fat, went into a discreet little cheese: reblochon, a soft cow’s milk cheese from the Haute-Savoie. The most widely served dish in Savoie descends from a medieval fiddle.

Farmhouse or dairy: the casein disc tells you

Reblochon has held AOP status since 1958. AOP, appellation d’origine protégée, is the French equivalent of the British PDO, protected designation of origin, and it governs far more than a place name.

Two categories sit side by side, told apart by the colour of the small casein disc set into the rind. A green disc means a dairy Reblochon, made in a fruitière, the village cooperative dairy, from the milk of several farms. A red disc means a farmhouse Reblochon, made on the farm itself, twice a day, immediately after each milking, with milk from a single herd.

The farmhouse version is more complex and more pronounced, and it varies from one wheel to the next. The dairy version is steadier. Both work in a tartiflette, the gratin of potatoes, onions, bacon and melted Reblochon that has become the signature dish of the French Alps; the farmhouse one simply leaves a longer finish. The Reblochon producers’ association sets out the boundaries of the appellation, which covers the Haute-Savoie and a narrow strip of the Val d’Arly.

The rind is edible, and it matters

This is where opinions divide, wrongly. The rind of a Reblochon is thin, faintly downy and entirely edible. In a tartiflette it plays a structural part: laid rind side up, it browns, colours the surface and holds back the cheese that would otherwise run to the edges of the dish.

The common mistake is to cut the rind away before the dish goes into the oven. The cheese then spreads, the gratin dries out, and you lose the slight bitterness that balances all that fat.

The quantities that make a good dish

A tartiflette for four calls for a whole Reblochon of 450 to 500 grams, roughly 1.2 kilos of firm waxy potatoes, 200 grams of bacon and two onions. That works out at a little over 100 grams of cheese a head.

Below that, the dish stops being a tartiflette and becomes a potato gratin. This, rather than the grade of the cheese itself, is the real difference between a version made properly and a version made cheaply, and it is the first thing to look for. If you are unsure, ask what weight of cheese goes into a portion; any serious kitchen will answer without hesitating.

The season counts

Summer Reblochon, made while the Abondance, Tarine and Montbéliarde cows are grazing the high pastures, develops more complex aromas: the mountain flora comes through in the milk. Winter Reblochon, from cows fed on hay, is milder and more uniform.

Summer wheels aged four to five weeks reach the table at the start of the ski season. That is one more reason to order a tartiflette in December rather than in April, a point we return to in our guide to Savoyard specialities.

What goes in, and what does not

Three questions come up again and again. White wine: a few spoonfuls to deglaze the onions add acidity and are a sound idea. Cream: it softens and binds, but too much drowns the cheese. Garlic: one clove rubbed round the dish is plenty, and more than that masks the Reblochon.

What does not belong: grated cheese on top, which betrays a mean hand with the Reblochon, and dried herbs, which have no business at 2,300 metres.

Our own tartiflette comes with a dressed green salad, and that is not a garnish. The acidity of the vinaigrette resets the palate between mouthfuls, which is exactly what a dish this rich needs. The same logic applies to what you drink alongside it, covered in our piece on Savoie wines.

The other Savoyard AOPs

Reblochon does not stand alone. Beaufort, Abondance, Tomme de Savoie and Chevrotin make up the region’s family of mountain cheeses, and each has its use: Beaufort for fondue and gratins, Abondance for berthoud, Tomme at the end of a meal.

The Savoie AOP cheeses site publishes the specification behind each appellation. The point worth taking away is that an AOP guarantees more than origin: it fixes the breed of cow, its feed, the altitude and the method.