Hello, I'm Arlene. Originally from Ohio, I've been apprenticing at a dairy goat farm in the Orono area of Maine for a year now. We make cheese with milk from our Nubian goats and from fresh jersey cow milk from our partner farm down the road. We have a 25 gallon cheese vat and I'm very familiar with soft goat and cow's milk cheeses, mozarella, cheddar and camembert. I found this forum this morning when I needed some advice on ripening cultures for a washed rind cheese that I'm working on developing. I was very happy to find some great information about Geotrichum and washed rinds. So thanks a bunch! I'm so glad I found this forum.
I'm working on a cheese that would be a camembert sized washed rind cheese. I am very happy with my camembert and my batches have been consistently successful. At this point, I'm sort of making up my own recipe with help from a previous washed rind recipe that we have used in the past for larger, pressed wheels. I bought a cheese in London in the fall that is guiding my ideal cheese.
I was actually wondering about washing cheeses with wine. Someone posted about a wine/salt mix they wash with which I thought was a great idea. How does the wine interact with the yeast and the overall pH of the rind? Does it help the b. linens to grow or is it more about flavor?
Thanks!
A wine wash actually lowers pH and slows down the b linens. Wine pH is usually 3.5-3.7. Even diluted with water, your wine wash will be acidic and slow down the b linens, which only starts to grow above somewhere in the 5.6-5.9 range (that's why geo is often used as the prep yeast to lower acidity). B linens can get out of hand pretty quickly. What you want is this delicate balance among the flora, and where b linens penetrates the rind enough, slowly, to flavor the paste of the cheese, and also die off and reproduce at an equilibrium rate so that it makes up a wonderful rind. A classic tomme will have b linens, for example, but it doesn't turn out "stinky" because the moisture is not there like for a brick cheese, and because it dies off and forms the rind.
What cheese are you trying to copy? One from Neal's Yard?
Also, the flavor result from a wine wash varies with type of wine, type of curd, washing routine, etc. It can vary from something like a cabre al vino, so something very very subtle, to wine used as color/dye only.
I can try to help formulate a cheesemake process for you if you want, but need a bit more help about what you're trying to make. Moist high flocc 6x curd or dryer 3x? Fresh eaten cheese or aged? Semi-lactic or rennet coag? Washed rind cheeses can be very tricky. Easiest for me is to reverse engineer an existing cheese.
Thanks for the input. I just finished my cheesemake and I decided to go with a pressed wheel like we usually make. I realized that my curd was not going to turn out the way I wanted it to half way through. :) The pH was dropping too quickly.
I bought a cheese from a smaller vendor at the Borough market and I have to confess it was last fall when I was pretty burnt out on cheese, so I wasn't really thinking too much about it at the time. But now I think back and I really liked that cheese! It was a small camembert sized round. I would say Mildly smelly, definitely not a strong flavor--but well balanced. The paste was similar to the paste of our camembert as well...soft-ripened and gooey towards the outside and more firm towards the middle. (we don't make a stable paste camembert.) The rind was nice and not too thin and evenly orange colored.
I've never used a wash with wine or any type of spirits so I thought it would be interesting to do an experiment with it. Depending on the development of the b. linens on this wheel, I may choose to try it later in the ripening process.
So my cheese should be more moist, semi-aged (4-5 weeks) and rennet coagulated. The milk I'm using is Organic jersey milk and the butterfat content is pretty high right now. I'm not sure of the percent but we get almost half the quantity in a cream layer if we let the milk sit.
I think I'll try again for the camembert sized cheeses later this week. I'm wondering if I can just follow the method I use when I make camembert and that way I won't have to press the cheese. Our press only handles big wheels...it's not set up for small rounds.
Was it an epoisses?
In other words, a soft, washed rind/smear rind cheese that's rather smelly, but not overwhelmingly so, and eaten like you said, at 3-8 weeks?
If it is, that's an easier one than other washed rinds. It's a full lactic curd (per DOC/AOC, you could likely pull it off with semi-lactic), ladled into mold, drains under it's own weight, then salted, and affinaged at a cooler 50-55, with washing every other day with a mixture of marc and water, then moved to fridge for keeping and sales.
Jos (OudeKaas on this forum) has some nice pics of his make of it http://heinennellie.blogspot.com/search/label/Smear%20Rind%20Cheese (http://heinennellie.blogspot.com/search/label/Smear%20Rind%20Cheese)
A small cheese like that is definitely not pressed and needs to start with high lactic acid (~4.7) so the bacteria have food to eat. If you do wash with wine, do it after you get a good bloom of b linens. At that point, it's used more as a way to spread the bacteria and keep them in check from getting too funky.
Logically speaking, you have a few options during the make that affect the outcome, and they involve when you "drain", or in this case, cut/ladle. You can coagulate for a long time with acid, then ladle (traditional epoisses) and let it drain, flipping the mold, and then salt. You can do a cam style make and coagulate with rennet, ladle or pre-cut and scoop, and then put into molds at a high pH and let the acid build up when the cheese is in the mold.
The results will be different, one more like a cam texture, and one more like an epoisses. The epoisses style is my personal preference because it still has a slightly solid middle, whereas with a cam, it's more difficult to achieve this.
Hi,
I'd like to try to make an epoisses cheese, I know it will be a bit of a challenge as I never made anything else than yogurt and fromage blanc, but I just love that cheese.
I was wondering if it would be ok to use a C20 starter culture (s.lactis, s.creamoris, l. biovar diacetylactis, vegetable rennet and malto dextrin) which is normally used for fromage blanc.
I was thinking about using a bit of an epoisses Berthaud rind bought in a store and wash it into a bit of distilled water, and use that to wash my cheese rind.
I know that the wash liquid has to contain an increasing amount of Marc brandy as the cheese is ripening, but does anybody has any idea what Marc concentration should I start with and what the final concentration should be? I guess that the b.linens must die if the Marc concentration is too high.