Limburger, Munster, Roquefort, and Camembert are just a few of the cheeses famous as much for their pungent aroma as for their taste. The world is full of stinky cheese, but according to a team of researchers, France’s Vieux Boulogne is the stinkiest of them all. Human sniffers were used to judge the odor of 15 of the world’s smelliest cheeses to determine which one has the worst odor. 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 researchers as a “mix of body odor and cow dung.” It stinks so bad that it’s banned from being eaten on public transportation in France. Surprisingly, it 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 the pungent smell that Vieux Boulogne is famous for.
