The world is full of stinky cheeses, but according to a team of researchers from Cranfield University, France’s Vieux Boulogne is the stinkiest of them all.

Limburger, Munster, Epoisses de Bourgogne, or Brie de Meaux are only some of the cheeses famous as much for their pungent aroma as for their taste, but the unofficial title of world’s stinkiest cheese goes to a French delicacy called Vieux Boulogne. Two decades ago, scientists at Cranfield University north of London tested 15 of the world’s stinkiest cheeses to determine which of them had the worst smell. They used human sniffers as well as a computer-linked ‘electronic nose’ to rank the odor of the cheeses and determined that Vieux Boulogne was by far the stinkiest.

Photo: Les Produits Laitiers

Vieux Boulogne is an unpasteurized, unpressed artisanal cheese made from cow’s milk. Developed in 1982 by Antoine Bernard and Philippe Olivier, the square-shaped-cheese quickly became famous for its pungent aroma described by Cranfield University academics as a “mix of body odor and cow dung”. It stinks so bad that it is banned from being eaten on public transport in France.

Surprisingly, Vieux Boulogne cheese has a smooth, mellow taste that doesn’t match its smell at all. That’s because it’s not the cheese itself that causes people to turn up their noses, but the orange rind around it. During the two months it spends maturing in cellars around the town of Boulogne-sur-Mer in northern France, Vieux Boulogne cheeses are washed with beer, which gives them their signature orange look and aroma. Apparently, the interaction between bacteria in the beer and the cow’s milk enzymes creates this pungent smell that Vieux Boulogne is famous for.

 

After their 2004 cheese smell test, scientists at Cranfield University performed a second test in 2007, using a more advanced electronic nose. Vieux Boulogne retained its title and hasn’t given it up since.

For more interesting cheeses, check out the world’s hardest cheese, and Milbenkäse, a cheese infested with live mites.