Since God left us on earth, we’ve been going round and round about taste.
Because, we do what we do, at least we Romanians, and we always end up at a table set with dishes, whether it’s lunch or dinner, wedding or funeral, whether we do it out of hunger or just to “taste” something. One way or another, we have elevated taste to an art form.
It is the art of cooking Romanian well, of using in food all that the earth gives us at its best, the art of satisfying not our hunger, but the need to eat something good, something tasty, something that either awakens a memory or creates one.
That’s where we started: from taste.
To give taste to a milk product is no great philosophy.
You just have to respect the ingredients, the process and the result.
Where does this unique taste of our products come from? Well, first of all, out of respect for the local people and their work, out of respect for the way they raise and feed their animals — we only use milk from local producers in the Gurghiu Valley.
Because these people don’t raise their animals with compound feed and chemicals. And now, in this holy 21st century, they still take their cows out to pasture from the moment spring breaks until winter settles in. And when the snow comes, they put hay in the barn that they mowed back in summer. And all of this can be tasted in our products.
Secondly, we don’t mistreat the milk. We treat it with respect and protect it, without squeezing the life out of it just for the sake of record yields and money. We leave it to its own nature, to give us the best it has, when and how it knows best.
And then there’s the brine — the Orșova brine. We don’t put salt in any of our products. Our salting is done with the brine we bring from the Orșova spring, exactly as the earth gives it to us.
On top of all this, however, comes the love of the people who work at Ibănești in production. It comes with the respect these people have for their work, for what comes out of their hands, for what we put on your table.
And, why not, on top of all this comes our stubbornness to always move forward, to look back not on hardships but only on experience, to always taste our products before sending them to the shops.
Out of respect for you, and for our work.
— Mircea and David Todoran
