Thursday, December 25, 2008

Chaource Style



This cheese I made on November 19 in the Chaource style. It was made after a recipe by Margaret Morris which called for an 8 hour ripening of the milk at room temperature after adding the culture. After this, it asked for two drops of rennet to be added before letting it coagulate for 8 hours.
After the 8 hours of ripening of the milk with the culture, my batch was already so far coagulated that it was impossible to add the rennet without breaking the curd. I consequently let the milk sit for the other 8 hours as asked for in the recipe (but without the rennet) and I ended up with a beautiful curd.
It turned out into a wonderful cheese, grassy and a little nutty.
Too bad I oversalted them. This is easy to do with the lactic type cheeses. Patrick Rance complains about this repeatedly in "The French Cheese Book", and not only regarding the lactic type.
So after reading this, I thought I was well aware of this and was in the good intention not to let this happen to me. "Better under- then oversalting" I thought. But now I see, it is more difficult than anticipated. I spoke to an artisinal cheesemaker recently who told me she would never let anybody else than herself salt her cheeses, especially the camemberts.