I followed Boofer's post on his Fd'A (
http://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,15512.msg118583.html#msg118583) closely and will have some further thinking to do when I try this cheese again. And I will!
I didn't brine mine too long because I'm particularly sensitive to salt, which may explain why the rind came out more blue than reddish tan. But, I have to say, the taste was exquisite!!! Hubby was a bit leery when he saw the wrinkly, slightly lopsided thing I tipped out of the old yogurt pail (my ripening container). I made a slice through which happened to coincide with where I skewered. The paste inside was white, smooth and mild. Creamy, not grainy. The fact that it had a blue-vein pedigree was obvious, but with none of the soapy or overly mushroomy taste or aroma. This one has become one of my favourite cheeses and if nobody else has tried a Fourme d'Ambert, I can recommend it heartily.
Being one degree north of the Equator, I've also taken to ripening at slightly cooler temperatures than recommended, as the initial culturing and curding process (not sure what else to call it) in a 33 Celsius (92 F) room appears to send the cheese into over-ripening hell when ageing...or the opposite. I found this particularly with my Faisselle, which refused to curd and refused to curd and refused to curd until I put the damned thing in the smaller drinks fridge overnight to finish ripening. So, when recipes say, "at room temperature", I have to play around with it before finding a temperature that works.
This was with 4L of homogenised, pasteurised supermarket milk, and I don't give a fig about curd firmness anymore because I hardly get any! So if
I can make it work, so can you!
I followed the recipe from "
200 Easy Homemade Cheese Recipes" by Debra Amrein-Boyes, but scaled down:
4L milk
1/8 tsp mesophilic culture
1/32 tsp P. roquefortii mould powder
1/4 tsp calcium chloride
1/2 tablet calf rennet
