Recipes

    Germany

    Germany is the largest cheese producer in Europe and has almost no reputation for cheese, which is a strange combination and worth explaining.

    It also has the cheese that finally settles an argument the France page started.

    Why German cheese has the reputation it has

    Two reasons, and neither is about quality.

    The industrial half is enormous and unglamorous. Germany makes vast quantities of good, cheap, unassertive cheese — Butterkäse, Tilsiter, industrial Emmentaler, Gouda-style block — and exports it in volume. That is what “German cheese” means to most people, and it is a fair description of most of the tonnage.

    And the interesting half is a category the rest of the world stopped making. Germany’s genuinely distinctive tradition is Sauermilchkäse — sour-milk cheese — and it is nearly invisible outside the country because it doesn’t travel, doesn’t age into a luxury, and looks like nothing.

    That deserves its own section, because it’s the one thing on this page that is structurally unlike everywhere else in Europe.

    ⭐ Sauermilchkäse: the survival that never became a curiosity

    Every dairy region in Europe kept one skimmed sour-milk cheese alive — Graukäse in the Tyrol, gamalost in Norway, Dorset Blue Vinny in England, Brusselse kaas in Belgium. In each of those it is a survival: beloved locally, marginal commercially, explained to visitors as heritage.

    In Germany it is a supermarket product. Harzer, Handkäse, Mainzer, Korbkäse — these are stocked everywhere, eaten routinely, and nobody thinks of them as historical.

    How they are made, which is the interesting part:

    Start from quark, not from a rennet gel. The milk is soured — acid-coagulated — and drained, so there is no rennet in the process at all. The quark is skimmed, so the fat is nearly gone.

    Then it is pressed into small shapes and surface-ripened, typically with Brevibacterium linens and yeasts, which turn it yellow-orange and translucent from the outside in and make it pungent.

    The result is a cheese that is almost pure protein and almost fat-free, which is why it turns up in German diet advice as a legitimate high-protein food — an accident of a technique invented because the butterfat was worth more sold separately.

    Handkäs mit Musik is the Frankfurt way to eat it: Handkäse with raw onions, vinegar and oil. The “music” is a joke about what the onions do to you later, and it is the honest register in which this cheese is actually discussed.

    ⭐ The lesson I take from it: these cheeses are usually presented as the poor relations of “real” cheese, and Germany demonstrates they don’t have to be. The whey and skimmed-milk by-product cheeses are a whole legitimate branch, and a country where they’re mainstream is proof the marginality was commercial, not culinary.

    ⭐⭐ Milbenkäse — the cheese ripened by animals, and eaten with them still on it

    And here is the page’s centrepiece, which pairs exactly with Mimolette.

    On the France page: Mimolette’s rind is grazed by cheese mites (Acarus siro), the affineur brushes them off, and in 2013 the FDA detained half a tonne of it because it exceeded a limit of six mites per square inch — some samples at four thousand.

    Milbenkäse — “mite cheese,” Mellnkase in the local dialect, and often wrongly called Spinnenkäse, “spider cheese” — takes the opposite view completely.

    How it’s made:

    Quark, flavoured with salt and caraway, shaped into small balls, cylinders or wheels, and dried.

    Then it goes into a wooden box containing rye flour, inhabited by Tyrophagus casei mites, for at least three months.

    The mites’ digestive juices diffuse into the cheese and cause the fermentation. The mites are not incidental to the rind, the way they are on a Mimolette. They are the ripening agent.

    ⭐ And the rye flour is in the box so that the mites don’t eat the entire cheese. Given something else to feed on, they nibble the crust instead of consuming the product. That is one of the cleverest details I have come across in this whole section: you feed the ripening organism a decoy.

    Then you eat it with the mites still clinging to the rind.

    Which makes it a fourth kind of ripening

    Rinds and moulds covers ripening by bacteria, moulds and yeasts — three microbial routes. Milbenkäse is a fourth: ripening by an animal. A mite is an arthropod, not a microbe, and it isn’t fermenting the cheese from inside a cell wall — it is digesting it externally and putting enzymes back in.

    I don’t think that gets said clearly anywhere, and it belongs in the taxonomy. Cheese can be ripened by something with legs.

    And the two regulators, side by side

    France: mites work the rind, are brushed off, the cheese is prized, and the United States impounds it as filth.

    Germany: mites are the process, are eaten, and the village put up a monument to the cheese mite.

    That memorial is real. It was erected at Würchwitz to mark the revival of Milbenkäse production, and the cheese sits on the Slow Food Ark of Taste.

    Two European villages, the same arthropod, and the difference between “contaminant to be controlled,” “ingredient to be brushed off,” and “the organism we build a statue to” is entirely a matter of local agreement. If there is one argument this world tour exists to make, that is it.

    🔴 It nearly died, and how it survived says something

    Milbenkäse has been made in the region since the Middle Ages, historically around the Zeitz and Altenburg districts on the Saxony-Anhalt/Thuringia border; today it is produced exclusively in the single village of Würchwitz.

    By the mid-twentieth century the method was almost gone. By 1970 one elderly woman, Liesbeth Brauer, knew how to make it, and it survived because she taught a local science teacher, who kept it going.

    That is the same shape as Britain’s collapse: more than 3,500 farmhouse cheesemakers down to under a hundred, and a tradition recovered because a handful of people were still standing when somebody came looking. A craft doesn’t need to be banned to die. It needs to be interrupted for slightly longer than one working lifetime. In Würchwitz the margin was one person.

    The rest of it

    Allgäuer Bergkäse and Allgäuer Emmentaler (both PDO) — the Bavarian arm of the alpine tradition, and genuinely first-rate. If you have dismissed German cheese, this is where to start.

    Weisslacker / Bierkäse (Allgäu) — “white lacquer” cheese, heavily brined, no rind, and so salty and pungent that its second name tells you what to drink with it.

    Limburger — Germany makes most of the world’s, though the name and origin belong to the Low Countries.

    Tilsiter — named for Tilsit in East Prussia, a town that is now Sovetsk in Russia. The cheese outlived the polity that named it, migrated west with the people who made it, and is now made in Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere. A small reminder that cheese names are historical documents.

    Altenburger Ziegenkäse (PDO) — a soft goat’s-milk cheese with caraway, from the same corner of Thuringia as the mite cheese.

    Nieheimer Käse — a small sour-milk cheese from Westphalia, reportedly ripened wrapped in hop leaves, which would put it squarely in the leaves-and-bark tradition. ⚠ I have not verified the hop-leaf detail against a primary source; treat it as reported.

    Cambozola — worth naming honestly. It is a modern industrial invention and a trademark, a soft blue-and-bloomy hybrid designed in the twentieth century to be a gentler Gorgonzola. It is not traditional and nobody claims it is, and it happens to be very good. Compare the processed and modern family: “invented recently” is not a criticism, and pretending otherwise is how food writing gets silly.

    Quark — not a cheese people list, and the most-eaten dairy product in the country. Everything on the Sauermilchkäse list starts here, and so do a great many cakes.

    Obatzda — a Bavarian beer-garden preparation, not a cheese: ripe Camembert mashed with butter, onion and paprika. It belongs on this page because it is the German answer to fromage fort — what you do with the cheese that has gone further than you wanted.

    What to take to the bench

    ⭐ Sauermilchkäse is the most achievable interesting cheese in this entire wing, and I am slightly annoyed I hadn’t thought of it. No rennet, no press, no cave, no wax. Sour some skimmed milk, drain the quark, salt it, add caraway, shape it small, and surface-ripen it somewhere cool with a B. linens wash. That is a week or two of work with equipment I already own.

    Caraway is the German cheese spice, in both Milbenkäse and Altenburger, and it works for the same reason cumin works in a Leidse.

    And I am not going to farm mites. But the decoy principle — give the organism something to eat that isn’t your cheese — is a genuinely transferable idea, and I have never seen it applied anywhere else.

    Next in this wing: Scandinavia, then east into the Balkans and the Caucasus.

    Sources

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