Abbaye du Mont des Cats is a mild orange-rinded cow's milk cheese made inside a Trappist monastery in French Flanders, twenty minutes from the Belgian border. It comes as a flat disc about ten inches across, an inch and a half thick, and close to four and a half pounds.
The name causes one specific problem at the counter. There is also a Mont des Cats beer, and the abbey does not brew it.
That split is worth understanding before you spend anything, because it is the clearest signal of what you are actually buying.
In This Article
Only the Cheese Is Actually Made at the Abbey
The International Trappist Association lists Mont des Cats cheeses as Authentic Trappist Products, made in the abbey's own cheese-making facility. It lists no Mont des Cats beer.
The beer is real, but since 2011 it has been developed and brewed at Scourmont Abbey in Belgium by the Chimay brewers. A product has to be made inside the walls of its own monastery to carry that logo, and the abbey's French brewery was never rebuilt after the First World War.
So when a shop tells you monks make this, the claim holds for the wedge and not for the bottle next to it.
The community settled on the hill in 1826 and built its dairy in 1849, selling a cheese it called Saint-Bernard. The Mont des Cats name has been on the cheese since the 1890s.
Seventeen of the abbey's twenty-three monks still work in production, alongside twenty lay employees. Four master cheesemakers take turns running the make, and one of them is a monk.
What the monks stopped doing is farming. The community gave up its own herd around 1970, and since 2004 the milk has arrived from the Danone collection site at Bailleul, roughly two million litres a year.
That is the honest shape of a monastery cheese today. The making is genuinely monastic, the milk is bought in, and the output runs to about 200 tonnes a year.
A Month in the Cellar Keeps It Mild
Taste it and the first thing you notice is how little it asks of you. Butter and fresh cream run through the middle, then the finish turns savoury and faintly mushroomy from the washed rind.
The paste is pale cream, supple and elastic under the knife, scattered with small holes. It bends instead of crumbling, and it never turns chalky the way a young lactic cheese can.
One month of aging is the reason for all of that. Cut short like this, a pressed cheese has no time to build the crystals, the salt concentration, or the sharpness that longer aging brings.
Culture Cheese Magazine describes the flavour as mild and subtle, with notes of milk and hay. That is fair, and it is also a warning if you came looking for a loud Trappist cheese.
The rind smells stronger than the paste tastes. A light cellar smell is normal on a healthy piece and it does not carry into the middle of the wedge.
Serve it cold and you will get almost nothing from it. Twenty to thirty minutes on the counter is what turns a bland slice into a buttery one.
The Orange Comes From Roucou, the Smell From the Wash
The rind is thin, faintly damp, and light orange, and neither the colour nor the smell arrives on its own.
The colour is dye. During aging the cheeses are washed in a salted solution carrying roucou, the red-orange colouring taken from annatto seeds.
The smell comes from the washing itself. Repeated brine washes feed the surface culture the abbey calls the ferments du rouge, and that bacteria is what gives washed-rind cheeses their savoury, cellar-floor edge.
Separating the two changes what a pale rind tells you. A weakly coloured washed rind has usually been through fewer washes, so it will taste flatter as well as look duller.
The rind is edible. It is thin enough to eat along with the paste, and if the savoury note is not for you, shave a few millimetres off rather than cutting away a thick layer of good cheese.
Pasteurized Milk Is Why It Reaches US Counters
Mont des Cats is made from pasteurized milk, and for an American shopper that single fact decides whether the cheese exists on this side of the Atlantic.
A raw-milk version could not legally reach a US counter at the age this cheese is meant to be eaten.
Under 21 CFR 133.187, a semisoft cheese made from milk that has not been pasteurized must be cured at not less than 35 degrees F for not less than 60 days. This one is sold at about half that age.
That also explains why some older French references still describe it as a lait cru cheese. Current French trade listings and the abbey's own account of the make both describe pasteurized milk, so read the label on the piece in front of you rather than the reputation.
The same fact makes the pregnancy question simpler here than for most French abbey cheeses. A pasteurized, pressed, washed-rind cheese sits in an easier category than a raw-milk soft cheese, though anyone pregnant should still follow their own doctor's guidance.
Seven Cheeses Carry the Mont des Cats Name
The wedge in the case is one of seven cheeses the abbey sells under the Authentic Trappist Product label, and they are not interchangeable.
The plain 2 kg disc is what most people mean by Mont des Cats. Everything else in the range changes the size, the aging, or the wash.
| Mont des Cats | The standard 2 kg disc, aged about a month |
| Le dessert des trappistes | The same cheese as a small tomme of roughly 500 g |
| Le Flamay | A 500 g tomme, its russet rind coloured with added roucou |
| La Bourle trappiste | A Flamay grown into a wheel over 2 kg and aged up to six months |
| L'Immersus 48h | Steeped in the abbey's own beer for 48 hours, then aged at least two months |
| Le dessert long affinage | The small tomme held longer in the cellar |
| Mont des Cats a la biere trappiste Westvleteren 8 | Finished with a Belgian Trappist ale |
Two of them are worth singling out. The dessert des trappistes is the practical buy if you are feeding two people and do not want a cut face sitting in the fridge for a fortnight.
The other is the Immersus, which spends 48 hours submerged in the abbey's beer before it ages. The beer brewed at Chimay comes back up the hill and ends up inside a cheese that genuinely is made at the abbey.
US shops that carry the cheese usually list it simply as Mont des Cats, so ask the counter which one they are cutting from. At the abbey shop in Godewaersvelde the difference is on the shelf in front of you.
The abbey name covers seven different cheeses, so asking for Mont des Cats gets you whichever one the counter has. Name the size and the finish you want.
It Melts Smooth Instead of Stretching
Heat is where a pressed, high-moisture, month-old cheese behaves differently from the Alpine wheels people usually reach for. It goes soft and creamy rather than pulling into strands.
That makes it good on toasted country bread and poor in anything built around a cheese pull. Grated, it will slump into a smooth layer within a minute or two under a broiler.
Keep the heat moderate. A young washed-rind cheese carries enough moisture to break and weep fat under hard heat, and a flavour this mild gives you nothing back for the risk.
It also works cold in ways the melt does not suggest. Thin slices on dark rye with wholegrain mustard use the savoury rind note instead of fighting it.
Dry White and Trappist Ale Pull in Opposite Directions
Androuet points this cheese at Muscadet sur lie, and the logic is straightforward. A dry, faintly saline white cuts the butter without adding flavour the cheese cannot answer.
Belgian Trappist ale goes the other way. Malt sweetness and yeast character meet the washed rind and push the whole plate savoury, which is the better move when the cheese is the point rather than the accompaniment.
For fruit, thin slices of pear or apple are enough. Anything sweeter buries a cheese this quiet.
Skip the strong preserves and the aggressive accompaniments. Fig jam, cured anchovy, or a peated whisky will leave you tasting the accompaniment and nothing else.
Buy a Fresh Cut and Wrap It Loosely
US shops sell Mont des Cats hand-cut by weight rather than as whole discs, so what you are judging is a cut face and a strip of rind.
The paste should look evenly cream-coloured and slightly moist. A dry edge, a cracked cut face, or a rind gone dull brown all mean the piece has been sitting.
The rind should be faintly tacky. Wet and slippery means it has been over-washed or badly stored, and dry and papery means it has lost the surface culture the flavour depends on.
Buy small. A cheese with one month of age and no protective concentration does not improve in your fridge, and the cut face is the first thing to go.
Tight plastic against the rind is the common mistake. It traps the moisture the wash left behind and turns the surface slimy within days.
Port Salut and Saint-Paulin Are the Closest Swaps
Mont des Cats is made much the way Port Salut is, and that is the first substitution to reach for. Both are pressed, uncooked, washed-rind cow's milk cheeses from the same French Trappist line.
Saint-Paulin is the same recipe made industrially, and it is far easier to find in an American supermarket. Expect it blander and more uniform than the abbey version, which is the trade you are making for the convenience.
For melting alone, a young Gouda or a Havarti gives you the same smooth behaviour. Neither brings the savoury washed-rind finish, so use them where the cheese is doing a job of texture rather than flavour.
If it was the beer-washed version you liked, stay inside the abbey family instead of moving to Gouda. Abbaye de Belval is finished with beer during aging and lands much closer to that darker, saltier profile.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
Abbaye du Mont des Cats FAQ
Two questions come up that the body of this profile does not answer.
No. The abbey states that it sets the milk with rennet taken from a calf's stomach, so the cheese is not vegetarian.
It is an alternative name for the same cheese on some French listings. Bailleul is the nearby town whose collection site supplies the abbey's milk.
