Making Washed-Rind Cheese

Taleggio, Reblochon, Limburger, Époisses, Munster, Morbier. Orange, tacky, and the cheeses that get a whole family of jokes to themselves.

The family page is who they are. This is how to run the rind — and the first thing to say is that “washing” is almost the opposite of what the word suggests.

The one thing: you are not cleaning it, you are farming it

A washed rind is a competitive-exclusion make. You keep the surface wet, salty and slightly alkaline, because those are conditions where the organism you want beats every organism you don’t. Wipe the surface and you’re not removing dirt — you’re spreading the culture around and reopening the rind so it can breathe.

The organism at the end of the story is Brevibacterium linens, which is what makes the orange colour, the sticky surface and the smell.

🔴 But B. linens can’t start, and that changes the whole schedule

B. linens needs a surface pH of roughly 5.5 and above. A cheese coming out of the mould has a rind at about 4.9. So on day one there is nothing on the surface that B. linens can live on, and washing it with a brine full of B. linens achieves very little.

What happens first is yeast. Debaryomyces hansenii and Geotrichum candidum are salt-tolerant, acid-tolerant, and they eat lactic acid — and as they consume it, the surface pH climbs. Somewhere in the first one to two weeks the rind crosses 5.5, and only then does the bacterium you actually want have somewhere to grow.

⭐ So the first fortnight of washing is a yeast schedule, not a bacterial one, and knowing that fixes the commonest complaint about this family — “I washed it faithfully and it never went orange.” Usually the answer is that the surface never deacidified: too dry, too cold, too salty, or the wheel over-acidified in the vat and started from too far down.

The make, step by step

1. Milk and culture. A gallon at 90 °F / 32 °C, mesophilic culture. Many recipes add a small thermophilic component for a softer body. Add the surface flora — a yeast blend and/or B. linens — to the milk as well as to the wash; it gives a more even start.

2. Rennet, floc multiplier 3½–4. A moderately soft set. This family sits between the bloomy rinds and the pressed cheeses in both moisture and handling.

3. Cut to ½–¾ inch. Rest, then stir gently and raise to 96–100 °F / 36–38 °C over about 20 minutes. Barely a cook. Many recipes also wash the curd here — see the semi-soft washed-curd page for what that buys — which gives a sweeter, higher-pH paste and, usefully, a rind that reaches 5.5 sooner.

4. Drain and mould, with little or no press. Square moulds for a Taleggio-style, small rounds for a Reblochon-style. Flip every half hour for the first few hours, then a few more times over 12–18 hours at 68 °F / 20 °C.

5. Brine or dry-salt. A short saturated brine, or dry salt at about 2%. Salt is one of your two levers on how fast the rind develops.

6. Dry the surface, overnight, until it’s tacky rather than wet.

7. Now the washing. This is the make.

A 3% brine — 1 oz salt to a quart of water — kept in the fridge, made fresh weekly.
Add the surface culture to the first two or three washes.
Wipe every face and the edge with a cloth or your hand wrung nearly dry. Damp, not soaked.
Every 2–3 days for the first three weeks, then weekly.
55 °F / 13 °C, 95% RH.

The rind will go from white to pale pink to orange, and from dry to unmistakably tacky. Six to ten weeks for a small format.

⭐ Beer, wine, cider and marc go in the wash in a lot of traditions, and it isn’t only romance: they bring sugars the surface flora can use and a little alcohol that suppresses competitors. Époisses is washed with marc de Bourgogne and tastes of it.

What “right” looks like

Tacky, not slimy. You want a rind that grabs your fingers slightly. A wet, sliding surface means too much moisture — wring the cloth out harder and check the humidity.

Orange, evenly. Patchy colour means patchy washing; get the edges.

It should smell strong and specific. Sulphurous, farmyard, a bit like a hot day. That’s methanethiol and its relatives, and it is the family’s signature rather than a warning.

And it should taste much milder than it smells. That gap is the running joke and it’s real.

What goes wrong

It never goes orange. The pH problem above, nine times out of ten. Also: too cold, too dry, too much salt, or you’re washing too rarely for the yeast to establish.

Black, green or blue fuzz. You lost the competition. The answer is to wash more often, not less — a well-established surface excludes them. Wipe visible fuzz off with brine and step up the schedule.

Slimy, running, ammoniated. Too warm, too wet, or over-ripe. Wrap it and get it cold.

Pink or orange slime that smells wrong rather than strong. Trust your nose here; the discard rules apply and this is the family where they are hardest to apply, because “smells alarming” is the normal condition.

⚠ It spread. B. linens is enthusiastic and it will move onto everything else on the shelf, including your bloomy rinds. Same scheduling problem as blue, same answers: a separate box, a separate space, or run the family in a batch and clean thoroughly afterwards. In a small cave this is a real constraint, not a footnote.

The members, and what changes

Taleggio-style. Square, mild, one of the gentler entries and a sensible first attempt.

Reblochon-style. Small, raw-milk, and 🔴 the reason you cannot buy the real thing in the United States: it ripens in about six to eight weeks, which is under the FDA’s 60-day minimum for raw-milk cheese. It’s a good illustration of a rule written for one hazard reshaping a cheese it was never aimed at — see the raw-milk wars.

Limburger. The loudest, and made in Monroe, Wisconsin by the last US producer.

Époisses. Washed with marc, and soft enough at the end to eat with a spoon.

Morbier. The dark line through the middle. ⚠ It was originally the soot from the bottom of the cauldron, brushed over the evening’s curd to protect it overnight before the morning milk went on top. Today it is vegetable ash and purely cosmetic — a decorative survival of a working practice, which is a pattern this section keeps running into.

Munster (Alsace). Not to be confused with American Muenster, which is a mild pressed cheese with a paprika-annatto coat and belongs with the semi-soft washed-curd family. Same name, unrelated eating.

Appenzeller. Washed with a herbal brine whose recipe is famously secret, and cooked hot enough that it belongs at least as much to the alpine cheeses.

Where I stand

I have not made one, and I’m not going to write this page as though I had. Everything above is research and reasoning against the mechanism rather than my own batches.

What I’ll say from the equipment side is that this is the family that most rewards a cave you can actually control. 95% RH with a wash every other day is a genuinely demanding specification, and it’s the one job where the humidifier in my rebuilt fridge is doing something a basement shelf can’t.

The formulas

⭐ And the wash itself is now a recipe — Cheese Wash, B. Linens — built around the fact that B. linens cannot start on a cheese fresh out of the mould, so the first fortnight is really a yeast schedule.

All five are written, and each one is here for a different reason rather than as another shape:

Cheese, Taleggio-Style — the one to start with. Cool, short, mild, and its name records the cows being tired after the descent from the alpine pastures
Cheese, Reblochon-Style — ⭐⭐ named after tax evasion, and the fraud is why it’s good: farmers under-milked in front of the landlord’s agent and milked again once he left, and the second draw is genuinely the fattiest milk they had
Cheese, Limburger — the loudest, and the one where the smell is not the taste. Its compounds overlap with the ones on human skin, which is why a malaria mosquito can be baited with it
Cheese, Morbier-Style — the line was soot, protecting the evening curd overnight until the morning milking. Today it is vegetable ash and does nothing: a working solution that survived as decoration
Cheese, Herve-Style — 🔴 the case where a protected name did not save the cheese. Herve has a PDO and is nearly extinct anyway

⭐ And the two etymologies landed on the same fact independently. The strong grade of Herve is called remoudou — Walloon for to milk again — which is precisely what reblocher means in the Savoie, five hundred kilometres away. Two dialects, one observation: the milk that comes out last is the best milk, and both regions thought it worth naming a cheese after getting hold of it.

⚠ All five are UNTESTED, for the reason stated above — I have not made a washed rind at all.

But two auxiliaries every make on this page needs are written: Cheese Culture, Mesophilic Mother and Cheese Brine, Saturated — and the brine one is the more important of the two, because a plain salt brine takes a good cheese apart in about a week.

Next: blue and mould-ripened — the one family where an open, badly-knit curd is the specification.