Accidental Cheeses
Making cheese blends science and craft and sometimes is the product of happy accidents.
Le Confine photo credit Au Petit Gravier.jpg
The tiny French town of Saulxures-sur-Moselotte in the verdant hills of northeastern France was on lockdown, like the rest of the country. Cheesemakers, Lionel and Laura Vaxelaire, had lost 80% of their business selling their Munster cheese and other dairy products. But, as Lionel told TF1 news in June, he kept milking his 25 cows because "you can't turn off their faucets." Pre-lockdown, Laura, would mix and mold the fresh milk into cheese rounds, which she carefully turned and washed by hand with salted water every two days. But as she got busy making deliveries to customers' homes, she just left a bunch of shaped cheeses in a corner of their cellar and forgot about them.
When the Vaxelaires retrieved these neglected cheeses after 60 days, they found a grayish-green rind had developed on the outside and a new taste on the inside, "between a Munster and a Camembert," described Lionel. After their children tasted it and approved, they needed a name for their new creation. It seemed only natural to call it Le Confiné (The Confined) since the cheese had been as confined as the French villagers. “Isolated and alone in its room,” as Laura put it. Lionel added a descriptor on the label with a double meaning, "it just came out," (il vient de sortir) reflecting the cautious euphoria of a country slowly emerging from months of sheltering in place. The cheese was an instant hit and quickly sold out. The Vaxelaires and their black and white beauties are making more; but it will only be sold at their farm, Au Petit Gravier.
Twenty years ago, another fluke de fromage halfway across the world had similarly serendipitous results. In 2000, at Northern California’s Cowgirl Creamery, a pair of visitors from England (one, a cheese monger and the other a cheese) unwittingly helped create a new prize-winner also by accident. Cowgirl Creamery’s co-founder, Sue Conley says that Kate Arding, from Neal’s Yard Dairy in England, had come to visit, and brought her renowned Colston Bassett Stilton. Her Stilton, in turn, had brought its microscopic cheese mites.
Red Hawk photo credit: Sara Remington.jpg
“Our “aging room” at the time was basically our walk-in refrigerator,” explains Conley, where Arding’s Stilton sat on a shelf next to Cowgirl Creamery’s elegant, triple cream Mt. Tam. Although Conley could not see the cheese mites at work on the Stilton, she could see the dust they left behind. A few days later, she noticed some pinholes in the rind of her Mt. Tam and realized the hungry little organisms had made the leap and were enjoying some California cuisine. She quickly grabbed a bucket of water to drown the invaders, then tried to re-inoculate her Mt. Tam with the Penicillium candidum that she used in the milk. But instead of growing fuzzy white, the rind became a sticky red. “I ruined it!” Conley concluded with disgust and shut the offending cheese in a Tupperware container and relegated it to the back of her mini-aging room. There it sat for two weeks, until Arding had an idea. “Let’s give it a taste,” she said and when she did told Conley it’s “the best cheese you ever made.” The savory cheese had a creamy texture and a pungent aroma. They named it Red Hawk for its red-orange rind, and in 2003, it won Best in Show at the American Cheese Society competition. Conley admits, this accidental cheese “is now our pride and joy.”
Eric Patterson, biologist and production manager at Cowgirl Creamery since 2002, explains that when the Penicillium candidum on Mt Tam’s rind was killed, it allowed the wild bacteria, yeast and mold, including Brevibacterium linens in Point Reyes’ coastal air to take over. This is why Red Hawk is still produced in Point Reyes, as opposed to Petaluma, the more inland locale where all the other Cowgirl Creamery cheeses are made. “Coastal yeast and bacteria are always blowing in,” says Patterson, “the important thing is creating an environment for one or another of them to survive.”
You are probably familiar with the romantic tale that credits another accident for the discovery of blue cheese in Roquefort, France. Legend has it that back in the seventh century, a young shepherd was lunching on rye bread and the cheese made from his ewes’ milk, when he spotted a beautiful mademoiselle in the distance. He supposedly stashed his half-eaten sandwich in a damp, cool cave and rushed out to pursue her. We don’t know how that love affair turned out, but the story is variously reported that when he returned to the cave weeks or months later, he found his cheese covered by blue mold. Whether it was because he always trusted his impulses (or as some stories recount, he was despondent with a broken heart and wanted to end his life?) he took a bite of the pungent cheese and the rest is history.
Despite recent scientific research on the biology of penicillium roqueforti mold spores and their absence in French caves, the sticking power of this tale of marvelous mishap can be explained by our attachment to romantic stories – especially French ones. Plus, the knowledge that part of the fascination of cheesemaking is that it is not always controllable, due to various unseen influences.
Dr. Michael Tunick, author of The Science of Cheese explains that “Wild bacteria, more properly called nonstarter lactic acid bacteria (NSLAB), are in the environment and often contribute to cheese flavor by settling in the milk and surviving the cheesemaking process. Starter culture bacteria are selected for their ability to out-compete other bacteria for nutrients, which is why the ripening process is not taken over by NSLAB under normal conditions. If cheese is left unattended or under less than optimal conditions, however, NSLAB may eventually “conquer” the microbes that should be there.”
Or as Sue Conley puts it poetically, “Cheese is a series of magical mysteries and endless questions.” She guesses that “while cheese accidents probably happen often, they may not result in a lovely new cheese, so the mutants are thrown out and we never hear about them.”