Bloomy Rinds

The white velvet cheeses — brie, Camembert, the triple-crèmes — and the family where the rind is the cheesemaker.

Everywhere else in this section, ripening happens more or less evenly through the paste. Here it happens from the outside in, driven by a mould growing on the surface, and nearly every characteristic of the family follows from that one fact.

How they work

Penicillium candidum is introduced — sprayed on the formed cheese, or added to the milk so it grows out — and over two or three weeks it covers the wheel in a dense white coat.

Then its enzymes work inwards. They break the paste down progressively from the rind toward the centre, which is why:

A young one is chalky in the middle. The ripening front hasn’t reached there. That’s not a fault; it’s a stage, and some people prefer it.

A ripe one is spoonable at the edge and firmer at the core, with the gradient visible on the cut face. Cut a Camembert and you can literally see how far the enzymes have got.

And they are made small and flat. This is the constraint that decides the shape of the whole family. A ripening front moving inwards from the surface can only travel so far, so the cheese has to be thin enough for the middle to be reached. You cannot make a Camembert the size of a Gruyère wheel — the centre would still be chalk when the outside had collapsed. Compare the alpine cheeses, which are interior-ripened and can therefore be enormous.

Geotrichum candidum is often present alongside, deacidifying the surface to prepare the ground — P. candidum prefers a less acidic surface than a freshly made cheese offers. More on both in rinds and moulds.

🔴 Ammonia: knowing when it’s gone

The failure mode of this family is specific and worth recognising, because it’s the difference between “perfectly ripe” and “throw it away.”

P. candidum deaminates amino acids and releases ammonia. As the cheese ripens, ammonia accumulates.

A faint ammoniac note on a very ripe bloomy is normal. Some people even like it.
A sharp, catching, cleaning-product smell is not. The cheese has gone past, and it will taste acrid.

Usually the cause is one of the cave numbers being off — too warm, too wet, or not enough fresh air exchange — or simply too long. The wrapping matters too: these cheeses need to breathe, which is why they come in that particular waxed paper rather than plastic film, and why a bloomy sealed in clingfilm in a fridge will ammoniate faster than it should.

The members

Brie. The large flat one. Note that “brie” in a supermarket and Brie de Meaux (raw milk, PDO) are quite different propositions — the protected one is a considerably more assertive cheese.

Camembert. Smaller, thicker, more intense. Again the PDO version — Camembert de Normandie, raw milk, moulded with a ladle in a specific way — is not the same thing as an industrial camembert, and the difference is one of the clearest arguments in the raw-milk debate.

Chaource. Taller, denser, more crumbly-centred, and less runny even when ripe.

Crottin and other bloomy goat cheeses. Small, often with Geotrichum giving that wrinkled, brain-like surface rather than a smooth velvet.

And the triple-crèmes — Brillat-Savarin, Saint-André and company — which need their own section because the number attached to them is routinely misunderstood.

🔴 What “triple-crème” actually means

Cream is added to the milk, and the categories are legally defined by fat:

Double-crème: 60–75% fat.
Triple-crème: a minimum of 75% fat.

Those numbers horrify people, and they shouldn’t, because they are fat in dry matter — the fat as a proportion of what would be left if you removed all the water. These are young, high-moisture cheeses, often around 50% water.

So the arithmetic that matters: a Brie sold as “60% butterfat” is, taken as a whole cheese including its water, about 31% fat.

A triple-crème is a rich cheese. It is not three-quarters fat by weight, and the label was never claiming it was. This is one of those figures that circulates as a shocking factoid entirely because nobody mentions the “in dry matter” part.

Making one, honestly

This is the family I’d tell a home cheesemaker to attempt third, not first.

The make itself isn’t hard — it’s a gently handled, high-moisture rennet curd, barely pressed. The difficulty is entirely in the three to six weeks afterwards, because you are managing a living rind at high humidity, and the margin between a beautiful bloom and a slimy or ammoniated mess is narrow.

What it demands specifically:

High humidity, at the top of the range — the 95%+ end.
Air movement, or the surface goes slick.
Turning, so the bloom develops evenly and the cheese doesn’t slump onto one face.
And a decision about when to stop it, usually by wrapping and chilling, because otherwise it will keep going until it’s ammoniated.

Which is exactly the kind of managed, attentive aging that a proper cave makes possible and a refrigerator does not. Steve Shapson’s guide exists specifically because this family is where general advice stops being enough.

How to make one: Making soft-ripened & bloomy-rind cheese — why the wheel is only an inch and a half thick, and what the paper wrap is actually for.

Next: blue — the family that wants an open, badly-knit curd on purpose.

Sources

Double-crème at 60–75% and triple-crème at a minimum of 75% fat in dry matter, and the worked example that a “60% butterfat” Brie is about 31% fat as a whole cheese: Formaggio Kitchen and The Cheese Professor