Walnut cheese made by nuns
The abbey was founded in 1868 by some monks from the abbey of Port du Salut. To allow the population to carry out a viable economic activity, they showed a cheese dairy equipped with a boiler and steam tanks. Year after year, the cheese dairy has developed around a product that has made it famous today: the trapped cheese. The 22 nuns who live there will welcome you to help you discover the abbey and this typical cheese.
ABBAY & ECOURGNAC CHEESE FACTORY
Take advantage of the site to visit the abbey and the cheese dairy and discover all the secrets of making the famous Trappe d’Echourgnac, a small pasteurized cow’s milk cheese with uncooked pressed paste and washed rind, produced in the Trappist tradition.
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History In 1861, the monks of the Abbey of Port du Salut in Mayenne founded the Abbey of Échourgnac in Périgord. They set up a cheese factory there and collect milk from surrounding farms, in order to transform it into a cheese that holds no secrets for them: Port Salut! It was in 1868, in Echourgnac, that La Trappe Echourgnac was born. But in 1910, its production stopped when the monks left the abbey. In 1923, the abbey welcomed Cistercian nuns, it was renamed the Abbey of Notre-Dame de Bonne Espérance. The sisters then took over the production of this cheese, respecting the monks’ recipe. In the 1990s, when the obligation to bring them up to European standards turned the future of the nuns upside down. It was by looking for new recipes based on local products that the Petit-Noix was born, a Trappe Echourgnac washed with walnut liqueur. YouTube Presentation