Recipe:French Cheese St Marcellin Style

This is a cheese made without rennet. Instead, we use yoghurt. It also helps to add a bit of the mouldy crust of any camembert style cheese you happen to have laying around.

What you need:

Ingredients

• a couple of liters of fresh milk (works with milk from the fresh-dept of the supermarket, but directly from the cow is always better as it contains all the stuff you need to turn it into cheese).
• some yoghurt
• some salt
• a knife point of geotrichum candidum (optional) or peel of white mouldy cheese.

Materials

• Big bowl
• bowl to contain dripping whey
• tablespoon
• kitchen towel (cloth, not paper) or cheese linen
• mason jars

How to make the cheese

• Day 1: stir the yoghurt, the salt (about 1% of total weight of milk) and the mould in the milk. Put in a relatively warm spot. Mine goes on the boiler of the central heating.
• Day 2: wait.
• Day 3: wait.
• Day 4: check the surface of the milk. If it starts to go all cringly, proceed. If it only shows some circles of white mould, wait a day longer. Lay your towel or cheese cloth into a large boil, tip everything in it. Leave to drip for a day or two in a relatively cool place (+/- 15 degrees celsius).
• By day 6 or so you should start to smell your cheese. It will also have gone mouldy. That's ok, it's what we're after. Put the cheese into one or more jars, fill them up for about 2/3. Leave the lid open for a couple of days and put them in a relatively cool place (15 degrees or so), until you see mould forming on the surface.
• Day 9 or so: When the surface of the cheese has a soft coating of mold, put the lids on the jars and leave to ripen 2-3-4 weeks in the fridge.