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Cheese from France

Lactic soft-ripened cheese family (goat/sheep/cow lactic curd)fromage de chèvre lactique

Lactic goat cheeses are set mostly by acid, with only a trace of rennet, over a day or two at cool room temperature. The soft curd is ladled into moulds, drains by itself, is salted (often with ash) on the surface and ripens in a humid room, where yeasts and moulds grow a rind from the outside in.

Fully documentedCheese13 days – 15 days

Recipe

Amounts from a sourceNo batch size is given. The figures are limits from French PDO specifications for single cheeses, not one tested recipe.
Whole goat milkRaw in the French PDO cheeses cited[smt-cdc-2021]
Rennet (520 mg chymosin per litre)At most 5 ml per 100 litresSainte-Maure limit; a mere trace, since the curd is mainly lactic[smt-cdc-2021]
Surface salt, often mixed with vegetable charcoal ashSalting in the mass before moulding is forbidden for Selles-sur-Cher[selles-cdc-2014]
Natural milk flora, whey from the last batch, or bought mesophilic bacteria, moulds and yeasts[smt-cdc-2021]
Starternatural milk flora, whey from the previous batch, or commercial mesophilic bacteria, yeasts and moulds

Total time across the recorded steps: 13 days – 15 days

Start
Drag the bar or press Play
shapes, not to countLactic acid bacteriaup to 25 °CMilk proteinGel (curd)

What changes: Lactic bacteria and a trace of rennet slowly set the milk

Step 1 of 5
Set the milk by souring with a little rennet
Time
18 h – 2 days
Set
Temperature
up to 25 °C
Set
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
Lactic acid bacteria
Yeasts
Geotrichum
Moulds

Output: lactic curd.

Flavour
clean lactic
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

mesophilic lactic bacteria acidify slowly

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

Lactic goat cheeses are set mostly by acid, with only a trace of rennet, over a day or two at cool room temperature. The soft curd is ladled into moulds, drains by itself, is salted (often with ash) on the surface and ripens in a humid room, where yeasts and moulds grow a rind from the outside in. Made in 5 steps over 13 days – 15 days. The longest step, ripen until the rind forms, takes at least 10 days (Ministère de l'agriculture 2021) and runs at 6–16 °C (Ministère de l'agriculture 2021). Lactococcus lactis, the main acidifying bacterium in Pélardon, a goat cheese of this type and Leuconostoc mesenteroides do most of the fermenting.

Key numbers
Main stepat least 10 daysSet[smt-cdc-2021][selles-cdc-2014]Ripen until the rind forms
Temperature6–16 °CSet[smt-cdc-2021]Ripen until the rind forms
AciditypH 4–4.5Set[picodon-cdc-2017]Ladle into moulds and let it drain

What makes this one different

Set mainly by lactic acid with only a trace of rennet, drained slowly with no pressing, and ripened by a surface rind instead of being cooked or pressed.

Related ferments

Variants

  • Ash-coated (Selles-sur-Cher, Sainte-Maure de Touraine)salted and dusted with vegetable charcoal on every face after moulding
  • Picodon washed and jar-ripened (affiné lavé, Dieulefit method)in the specification's account of old practice, surplus cheeses were kept in clay jars and washed every fortnight for long keeping

Made the lactic soft-ripened cheese family way

Other lactic soft-ripened cheese family kinds

Made the same way, each with what its own sources record.

Fleur du Maquis (Brin d'Amour)Brin d'amour

Cheese from France, Corsica

A herb-flavoured Corsican cheese with a mouldy rind; unpressed and uncooked, moulded by hand and salted once dry.

Size
About 700 g, roughly 12 cm across and 6 cm thick
Ripening
45 to 120 daysReported

Sources: French Moments; culture magazine; US Food and Drug Administration 2016

Humboldt Fog

Cheese from United States, California, Arcata

A Californian goat cheese in the French ash-coated style, with a Morbier-like ash line through the middle as well as ash under the rind.

Sizes
Small wheel about 9 × 5 cm, 310–400 g; large wheel about 18 × 5 cm, 2–2.25 kg
Ash
A line of edible ash through the middle, as in Morbier, and ash under the rind

Sources: CooksInfo; Wikipedia; NHS

Innes Log

Cheese from England, Staffordshire

A British farmhouse lactic goat cheese, slow-set overnight with whey from the previous day and little rennet, made only from the farm's own raw milk.

Milk
Raw goat milk from the farm's own herd, which grew from 100 goats in 1987 to 350
Kidding
Goats kid from February to July so there is milk all year

Sources: Neal's Yard Dairy; US Food and Drug Administration; La Fromagerie

Saint-Félicien (Dauphiné/Lyonnais)saint-félicien

Cheese from France, Rhône, Ain, Drôme, Isère

Thicker, richer, creamier cousin of Saint-Marcellin; Lyon trade name from 1956. Not the Ardèche goat-milk « caillé doux de Saint-Félicien », a farm cheese renneted warm right after milking.

Milk
Cow milk only, by the decree; a farm goat-milk cheese sold as « caillé doux de Saint-Félicien » in Ardèche is a separate product
Rind
Thin surface moulds
Size
Cylinder 85–120 mm across, 20–40 mm high, 150–220 g when packed (Wikipédia, unsourced)

Sources: Wikipédia (fr); Assemblée nationale 2017–2018; US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Safety

These are raw-milk cheeses in the cited PDO rules. ANSES names soft bloomy-rind raw-milk cheeses such as camembert, brie and crottin among the main sources of hazards in French raw-milk cheese. It advises pregnant women, young children, people over 65 and people with weak immunity not to eat raw-milk cheeses other than cooked pressed ones. Picodon sets curd pH 4 to 4.5 at moulding. Sainte-Maure cheeses may leave the ripening room only after 10 days from renneting and with a well-developed rind.

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

The Picodon specification says Olivier de Serres described the goats of the Bas-Vivarais in 1600, and that the cheese reached the appellation (AOC) by decree of 25 July 1983. The Selles-sur-Cher specification says the cheese began as a domestic product made by women, who used ash and later charcoal powder mixed with salt, that egg-and-poultry collectors (coquetiers) began to gather and ripen the cheeses at the end of the 19th century, and that the chamber of agriculture of Loir-et-Cher asked the minister for an appellation on 13 December 1936.

  1. [selles-cdc-2014] Ministère de l'agriculture 2014, Cahier des charges de l'appellation d'origine « Selles-sur-Cher » (avis AGRT1413735V)spec
  2. [smt-cdc-2021] Ministère de l'agriculture 2021, Cahier des charges de l'appellation d'origine protégée « Sainte-Maure de Touraine », homologated by arrêté of 17 November 2021spec
  3. [picodon-cdc-2017] Ministère de l'agriculture 2017, Cahier des charges de l'appellation d'origine protégée « Picodon » (BO n° 2017-38)spec
  4. [penland2021] Penland M. et al. 2021, Linking Pélardon artisanal goat cheese microbial communities to aroma compounds during cheese-making and ripening, International Journal of Food Microbiology (abstract)paper
  5. [leclercq2019] Leclercq-Perlat M.N. et al. 2019, Physicochemical and sensory evolutions of the lactic goat cheese Picodon in relation to temperature and relative humidity used throughout ripening, Journal of Dairy Science (abstract)paper
  6. [anses2022] ANSES 2022, Fromages au lait cru, quels risques pour la santé et comment mieux les prévenir (8 April 2022)gov