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 that can go into the oven
• 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.
• 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.