Cheese, Limburger

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

Limburger is the loudest cheese in general circulation and the punchline of a century of jokes, and the interesting thing about it is that the jokes are about the smell and the smell is not the taste. The gap between the two is wider here than in any other cheese, and people who brace themselves for the flavour to match are routinely surprised.

⭐⭐ And there is a genuinely startling fact underneath the smell. The compounds B. linens produces on a Limburger rind are closely related to the compounds produced by the bacteria on human feet — which is why the cheese smells the way it does. A Dutch entomologist, Bart Knols, showed that Anopheles gambiae — the principal African malaria mosquito, which preferentially bites people on the feet and ankles — is attracted to Limburger cheese. The work won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2006 and was seriously proposed as a basis for baiting mosquito traps.

So the cheese’s smell is a real biological signal, not a defect — and it is the same signal a mosquito uses to find an ankle.

🔴 In the United States it is now made by one producer: the Chalet Cheese Cooperative in Monroe, Wisconsin, the last American maker.

Ingredients

• 2 gallons whole milk (not ultra-pasteurised)
• 1/4 tsp mesophilic culture
• 1/8 tsp Brevibacterium linens — a heavier dose than the rest of this family
• 1/16 tsp Geotrichum candidum or a yeast blend
• 1/2 tsp calcium chloride solution, if the milk is shop-bought
• 1/2 tsp liquid rennet, single strength, diluted in 1/4 cup cool unchlorinated water
• 1 quart 3% wash brine, made fresh weekly
• 4 small rectangular moulds, or one loaf-shaped mould cut into bricks
• Foil or parchment, for the final weeks

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. Warm to 90 F / 32 C, culture, and dose the B. linens heavily. Double what you would use on a Taleggio. This cheese is not subtle and the make should not pretend otherwise.

Ripen 45-60 minutes, rennet at a flocculation multiplier of 3 1/2.

2. Cut to 1/2 inch and stir gently at 90 F for about 20 minutes. ⚠ No cook at all. Limburger is a high-moisture cheese and the moisture is what lets the surface enzymes work their way inward as fast as they do.
3. Drain and mould as bricks, unpressed. Flip frequently over 12-18 hours at 68 F.

Dry-salt at about 2%, then dry the surface.

The wash itself — this is the make.

4. • A 3% brine: 1 oz salt to a quart of water, kept in the fridge, made fresh weekly.
5. • Add the surface culture to the first two or three washes only.
6. • Wipe every face and the edge with a cloth or your hand wrung nearly dry. Damp, not soaked.
7. • Every 2-3 days for the first three weeks, then weekly.
8. • 55 F / 13 C, 95% RH throughout.
9. ⚠ You are not cleaning it, you are farming it. Wiping spreads the culture around and reopens the rind so it can breathe. A rind left alone grows the wrong things.
10. ⭐ Ripen a little warmer than the rest of the family — 55-60 F / 13-15 C — which is what pushes it as far as it goes.
11. At about 4 to 5 weeks, wrap it. Foil or parchment, and back to 45 F. 🔴 The wrap is what makes a Limburger a Limburger: it stops the surface drying, keeps the smear active against the paste, and concentrates everything. An unwrapped brick just dries out.
12. Total 6 to 10 weeks. It is ready when the paste under the rind has gone soft and translucent and the whole brick yields. Younger it is mild and firm; older it is spreadable and extremely assertive. Both are legitimate and the difference is weeks, not technique.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t 🔴 UNTESTED. Limburger is a generic name and free to use — it takes its name from the Duchy of Limburg, now split across Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, but the cheese itself is not protected.

🔴 Why the wash schedule is really a yeast schedule Brevibacterium linens — the organism that makes the orange colour, the tacky surface and the smell — 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 up there 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 and acid-tolerant, and they eat lactic acid. As they consume it the surface pH climbs, and somewhere in the first one to two weeks the rind crosses 5.5 — and only then does the bacterium you actually wanted have somewhere to grow.

⭐ So the commonest complaint about this family has a specific answer. “I washed it faithfully and it never went orange” almost always means 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 feet, the mosquitoes, and the Ig Nobel B. linens on a cheese rind and the bacteria on human skin produce overlapping volatile sulphur compounds — which is why the comparison people make as an insult is, chemically, roughly accurate. Bart Knols demonstrated that Anopheles gambiae is attracted to Limburger, work recognised with an Ig Nobel Prize in 2006 and taken seriously enough to be proposed for mosquito trap bait. ⚠ The Ig Nobels reward research that makes you laugh and then think — this is not a joke award for bad science, and the finding stands.

Smell versus taste The smell is dominated by methanethiol and related sulphur volatiles, which are extraordinarily potent by weight — a nose detects them at concentrations a tongue cannot register at all. The paste is savoury, meaty and salty rather than aggressive. That gap is the family’s signature and it is at its widest here.

The American survivor Chalet Cheese Cooperative, Monroe, Wisconsin is the last US producer, in a state where Limburger was once a substantial industry. It is a good reminder that a cheese does not need legal protection to become rare — it only needs to fall out of fashion.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/washed-rind/ on the site.