Saucisse de Montbéliard PGI

A Montbéliard is not just any sausage! Secular traditions and a PGI make sure of that. Let's start with the quality of the meat used: it needs to be French pork, from pigs reared on whey, as part of a circle that is virtuous to say the least. Cows fed on the fresh grass of the pastures in warmer weather and on hay in the winter produce milk for cheesemaking. When this curdles, it produces a very rich liquid or lactoserum, which is then fed to the pigs. They in turn provide the manure used to fertilize the meadows, thereby closing the loop. The meat from these animals is sorted to obtain a mixture of lean and fatty pork, then seasoned, mainly with salt, pepper and cumin. It is then coarsely chopped and tumbled, and the resulting preparation is stuffed into natural, non-colored casings, which are sealed by twisting, producing strings of sausages. Then, all that is left is to smoke them, slowly and using only naturally burned sawdust and softwood.