What is the smelliest French cheese?

France is home to a lot of cheeses and some of them have what might be described as a pungent odour – but which French cheese is the smelliest of them all?

Oozy, runny, stinking . . . many good French cheeses have a powerful scent, and some of them are best eaten outdoors, as far away from civilisation as possible.

If you’re on the lookout for a truly reeking cheese (or you want to avoid the ones that bring with them a bouquet of week-old sweaty socks), here’s a rundown of some of the most pungent that France has to offer.

While there isn’t an official ranking of le fromage qui pue le plus (the cheese that stinks the most), a British university has done some research into this and awarded a smelliness crown.

READ ALSO: Exactly how many different types of cheese are there in France?

Here’s the ‘officially’ smelliest cheese, plus a few that would definitely make it onto the shortlist.

We’re obviously not including brie or camembert in this list – those are entry-level cheeses, strictly for smell amateurs. We’re talking truly odoriferous here.

7 Reblochon – this cheese is usually for cooking, it’s the traditional cheese used to make tartiflette, the hearty French winter dish of potatoes, cheese, onions and bacon, baked in the oven.

READ ALSO: The six best French winter dishes made with cheese

A soft (but not runny) cow’s milk cheese, it comes from the Savoie area in the French Alps, which is also where tartiflette was invented – the dish is a popular après-ski. In its natural state, it’s quite smelly, but the smell kicks up a notch once it goes into the oven to be baked into a tartiflette.

Many of the French winter cooking cheeses are reasonably smelly – if you go out to a fondue or raclette restaurant, you can expect the smell of the melting cheese to hang in your clothes and hair the following day.

6 Munster – this doesn’t sound like a French cheese, but it is. It comes from the historic region of Alsace-Lorraine, which has a lot of German influences (the cheese has the much more German-sounding name of Minschterkaas in the local Alsace dialect).

It’s another soft cow’s milk cheese, but this one is washed with salt water during its maturing process, which gives it a briny taste and a powerful aroma.

5 Maroilles – another one that has a brine wash to its crust – creating a powerful stench of salt marshes mixed with sweaty feet – is maroilles, which also comes from the north east of France.

One truly peculiar thing about maroilles is that locals in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region apparently like to dip it in their coffee when having breakfast. A famous scene of this in the hit comedy film Bienvenue Chez les Ch’tis apparently led to a spike in sales.

4 Pont l’Eveque – this cheese (translating as ‘bishop’s bridge) is a soft, runny, cow’s milk cheese made in Normandy. In many ways, it’s similar to Camembert, but is simply more so – especially when it comes to the smell.

It’s one of the oldest recorded cheeses in France, having been made in the same area since at least 1230 – and the powerful pong suggests that the piece you buy in your local cheese shop might have been maturing since roughly that date.

However its silken, creamy taste has won it a lot of fans – it even features in a poem from 1622 in which the writer declares ‘Tout le monde également l’aime car il est fait avec tant d’art que, jeune ou vieux, il n’est que crème’ (everyone loves it equally because it is made with such skill that, whether old or young, it is nothing but cream).

3 Saint Nectaire – this cow’s milk cheese from Auvergne in central France is spectacularly soft and oozy (leave it long enough and it will slide right off the cheeseboard) and smelly.

French cheese expert Jennifer Greco describes it as having “a range of flavours and aromas including hazelnut, butter, yeast, clean sand and raw mushrooms”, although others have described the smell as being similar to horse dung.

It’s a very old cheese, made in the mountainous Auvergne region since at least the middle ages, and was reportedly a favourite of Louis XIV (quite a few cheeses claim to be the favourite of the ‘Sun king’ – either he really liked cheese, or producers figured that it was safe to make this claim after 1789 since his descendants had bigger things to worry about than possible false advertising).

2 Epoisses de Bourgogne – there’s an often-repeated ‘fact’ that this cheese is so smelly that it’s forbidden to take it on a French train. We could not find any such rule – although it would certainly be more considerate to your fellow passengers to take a less smelly cheese for your onboard picnic – so this fact might have to be consigned to the same bin as the one about it being illegal to name a pig Napoleon in France.

But while the train thing might be a myth, it’s certainly true that this cheese is smelly.

It comes from the Burgundy region and is a soft, cow’s milk cheese with a washed rind – similar in appearance to a camembert, although much runnier (it’s traditionally eaten with a spoon).

The cheese, originally produced by monks, was known to be a favourite at the court of Louis XIV (him again) and by the time the Ancien Régime fell, the cheese was famous in France. Its dubious associations with royalty don’t appear to have harmed its reputation, and it’s said that this was also Napoleon’s favourite cheese, although like a lot of Napoleon apocrypha, contemporary sources are slightly lacking.

1 Vieux-Boulogne – this is the one that Cranfield University in the UK crowned the world’s smelliest cheese in 2004 after undertaking what they described as a detailed scientific study of the scent profiles of various cheeses, using both expert human testers and electronic ‘noses’.

The cheese comes from Boulogne-sur-Mer on the northern French coast and is a cow’s milk cheese. Part of the maturing process involves washing the cheese rind in beer, and it’s this combination of beer and fermenting cheese that produces its unique odour, which one British journalist described as “a farmyard aroma, replete with dung”.

That doesn’t put off true cheese lovers, however.

Cheese seller Victor Authier tells the French cheese periodical Tout un Fromage: “Ah, Vieux-Boulogne! When I tell my customers that I have some in stock, I immediately see two types of reactions: either they take a step back, or their eyes light up with excitement. Because yes, this little cheese from Nord-Pas-de-Calais officially holds the title of ‘the world’s smelliest cheese’. And believe me, after 15 years of handling all kinds of cheese, I can confirm that this title is well deserved!”

What’s your favourite stinky French cheese? Share your recommendations for your fellow aficionados in the comments section below