Baked Mont d’or with bacon potatoes

Baked Mont d’Or is one of the easiest recipe ever: all you have to do is put this wooden box in the oven. Traditional in both French and Swiss Jura, the cheese wears the name of “Golden Mountain”. People usually add in it some garlic and white wine, and serve it with warm potatoes. Delicious!

Ingredients for Baked Mont d’Or

• 1 Mont d’Or Vacherin
• 5 cl white wine
• 1 garlic clove
• 500g small potatoes
• 8 bacon slices
• salt, pepper

Directions

Preheat the oven to 400 F.

Wash and dry the potatoes, but do not peel them. Put the potatoes in a medium pot, cover with cold water, season with salt and bring to a boil. Let them boil for approximatively 5 minutes: they need to be almost but not fully cooked!

Drain them and put them in a bowl. Drizzle some olive oil, salt and pepper and toss until the potatoes are well coated. Wrap them all in a piece of bacon (I used approximatively a third of the strip for each potato).

Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper and put your potatoes so that the the bacon extremity lay on the parchment paper. The weight of the potato will allow the bacon to seal without unwrapping during baking. Bake for 20 minutes, and toss from time to time. The bacon should be crispy and brown.

Meanwhile, open your cheese box. We need to season the cheese with garlic and white wine. To do so, every house has its own way: you can slash a cross on thop of the cheese and insert your garlic clove, then pour your wine in this cross. You can also cut your garlic cloves into small bits and insert them every where in the cheese. Or you can dig a hole, pour garlic and wine, and put the cheese hat back to cover the hole.

For security, wrap the box with some aluminium foil: it will prevent any leakage from cheese and wine. Bake for 15/20 minutes in a preheated oven to 180 C.

Then, enjoy your baked Mont d’Or either like a fondue in the middle of the table, by plunging your potatoes in it. Or spoon the cheese over your potatoes on a plate. You can add some green salad or pickles for freshness.