the crottin de chavignol that didn't kill us

well JG and I ate my first cheese last night, and we're both still alive. actually, it wasn't really my first cheese, we also survived a chèvre which I made two weekends ago, but that's pretty hard to fuck up. not exactly living in the edge.

the first matured cheese I made was a blend of goat and cows milk in the style of a crottin de Chavignol. crottin is one of the French farmhouse types of slowly ripened lactic acid cheeses, where most of "curd work" is done by bacteria forming lactic acid and very little rennet is required. this means, among other things, a long setting period (24 hours for this batch) and a creamy, sometimes semi-liquid interior which forms under the rind. Saint-Marcellin is another favourite example of this method. I really love this kind of gooey mouldy cheese, so I decided to bypass the usuall beginners cheeses and suffer the possible consequences (at best, failure; at worst, unwittingly culturing a deadly strain of bacteria). I was particularly inspired to make a crottin style because I so much love the fantastic Mature Veloute by Holy Goat.

there are so many types of cheese for which production methods are not well documented, particularly those that originated in smaller villages for family consumption only rather than market production, such as crottin and cabecou (although interest in these is increasing), so while an experienced cheesemaker might not have too much trouble figuring out the process, I have been piecing together snippets of information in order to gain a picture of how a crottin should be produced. fascinating fact #467 is that "crottin" is a colloquial term in the Chavignol region for horse shit. so I knew my cheese needed to have the appearance of horse shit. that was a good start.

this is the method I came up with:
The cheese milk sits for about 24 hours at about 22°c, and the whey becomes quite sour although the curd eventually becomes sweeter with maturation (when I first took the lid off the pot after setting it smelled a bit like
cheap white wine).

rather than ladling the curd straight into the crottin baskets for draining I hung it in cheesecloth first as my crottin baskets are masterpieces I made myself with food storage containers and a hot nail (no photo of that particular stage, because it looks like I was making a bomb).
anyway I was concerned they wouldn't drain as efficiently as the purpose-designed baskets so I gave the curd a bit of a head start hanging over the sink in bags.

once the drained curds were in the baskets they continued to drain and formed a white fluffy layer of mould due to the addition of penicillum candidum. this bloomed very fast, mostly because I couldn't keep the temperature cool enough in my "cheese cave" (a stryrofoam drug transport box). they need to spend the first 8 days or so in a high humidity "cave environment" at 10-14°c (depending on who you read), however all of this was purely academic because my cave rarely stayed below 15°c despite my diligent efforts with ice and ice bricks (my only conclusion at this point is that styrofoam is shite and I am dreaming up a new cheese this very minute.)

after 8 days and more research, I figured that they probably should've been turned out of the baskets earlier, so last night I did that and the first thing I discovered was that the mould rind had only developed on the top exposed surface. the second thing I discovered was that the bit I got on my finger tasted really good and not at all toxic.

despite thinking we should really wait a few more days (although I now know that people eat crottin at almost any stage from very fresh to about 3 weeks old, some even more mature), we decided to
eat the little mini-crottin I made immediately.

although this little round was mostly naked due to not forming a rind in the basket, the rinded side was exactly what I'd hoped to achieve: a well-flavoured mould rind with a layer of liquid under the surface and a soft creamy centre.

the remaining full-sized crottins are going to continue maturing in a styrofoam box in the fridge (if only to retain humidity from the layer of water in the bottom) and I will see how this affects the mould and rind formation over the next week (if we let them live that long- they're pretty tasty).