A team of divers is searching at the bottom of the Baie des Ha! Ha! in north-eastern Canada for 800kg of cheddar sunk by an entrepreneur hoping to revolutionise cheesemaking.
“A few years ago, a fisherman came to us and said he’d found a piece of Boivin cheese at the bottom of a lake where he’d been diving. He took it, hesitated, ate it and told us it was one of the best cheeses he’d ever eaten,” dairy owner Luc Boivin said.
Stunned by the fisherman’s gastronomic adventure, the dairy, established four generations ago, discovered that deep depths are good for cold storage and water pressure accelerates the cheese ageing process.
So, the family cheese-dairy chucked 10 barrels containing the cheddar into 40m of water at the bottom of the Baie des Ha! Ha! in the Saguenay region.
The owner asked divers to collect the cheese, but several searches on Thursday returned empty-handed.
“We’ll definitely find it,” Boivin said, watched closely by Canadian authorities who wish to prevent the cheese from hitting store shelves because it is not possible to ensure the quality, according to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. — AFP