Holidays in Béarn: enjoy a Pé Descaous, a cheese with a sustainable footprint

Based in Issor, in the Aspe Valley, she brings her flock of sheep up to the heights of the valley in the summer in the area frequented by bears, and defends her way of working through this label. "I look after and lead my sheep all day to maintain the mountain, and I pen them in the evening near the cabin in an enclosure that I move every eight days in order to enrich poor areas," she explains. "You need manure for good grass to grow."

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Élise tends her sheep in the summer pastures from May to October. "Living up there, at an altitude of 1,700 meters, exposed to the elements, is part of the job, even if it's sometimes difficult. Without it, I wouldn't be a shepherdess, but a farmer."

While summer pastures are a necessity to free up cultivated land for hay, it is also up there that milk production is best. "This terroir, the flowers and all this plant diversity that the sheep feed on, is what gives the cheese its fruity and fragrant taste."

The Pé Descaous brand implies that the sheep's milk tomme is made in a traditional way and in compliance with very strict specifications. The cheese must be made from raw milk, made daily, with no additives other than pressure and salt, and the sheep must be fed only on pastures. Every morning, the milk from the milking is heated in a copper cauldron to curdle. Then cut into grains, heated again and stirred, it is collected by hand and pressed into molds. On the face of the cheese, the shepherdess places the bear's paw, the seal of the Pé Descaous brand, which will remain embedded in its rind during maturation.

By stamping her sheep's cheeses with this label, Élise is demonstrating her commitment to biodiversity and bear conservation. Her organic farmhouse cheese is also labeled Esprit Parc National. "However, there's a missing label," she notes. "A 'handmade' label highlighting manual milking, which excludes the corn ration given to the sheep to get them onto the milking platform by machine—without which they wouldn't get on the milking platform—to distinguish our work from others."