Cheese, Saint-Marcellin-Style

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

Saint-Marcellin is a small, very wet, lactic-set bloomy round from the Dauphiné — about 80 grams — and it is famous for a property that sounds like a defect: it eventually cannot hold itself up.

⭐ That is why it is sold in a crock. The little glazed faisselle or terracotta dish is not presentation and it is not tradition for its own sake — a well-ripened Saint-Marcellin is structurally incapable of sitting on a board, and the pot is there to catch it. Packaging as an admission about the cheese inside is a pattern this collection likes.

Like a crottin it is eaten across a range rather than at a point: firm and chalky and mild at two weeks; spreadable at four; completely coulant — flowing — at six. All three are correct and people have strong preferences.

🔴 And it was originally a goat cheese. It is now made overwhelmingly from cow’s milk, and the protected version permits both — which is a rare case of a protected name that documents a change rather than freezing one.

Ingredients

• 1 gallon whole milk (not ultra-pasteurised) — cow, or goat for the older style
• 1/8 tsp mesophilic culture
• 1/16 tsp Geotrichum candidum
• A pinch of Penicillium candidum, optional — for a whiter coat
• 1/4 tsp calcium chloride solution, if the milk is shop-bought
• 3 drops liquid rennet, single strength, diluted in 1/4 cup cool unchlorinated water
• 1 1/2 tsp fine salt
• 4-5 small moulds, about 2 1/2 inches across
• Small crocks or ramekins, for the ones you intend to ripen fully

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. Warm the milk to 72 F / 22 C. Room temperature. Add the culture and the Geotrichum — which is the primary rind organism here, not P. candidum. A pinch of P. candidum gives a whiter, denser coat if you prefer that look.
2. 🔴 Three drops of rennet for the gallon. A lactic set, as for Cheese, Chaource-Style.
3. Cover and leave 12 to 18 hours at room temperature, to a firm set with clear whey on top.
4. Ladle into the small moulds, uncut. Drain 24 to 48 hours at room temperature, flipping once they can take it. ⚠ Drain these LESS than a crottin — the high moisture is the whole character, and a Saint-Marcellin drained hard is just a small bloomy round.
5. Dry-salt lightly, about 1.5%, then dry the surface. Lighter than the rest of the family; heavy salt suppresses the Geotrichum you are relying on.
6. Ripen at 50-55 F / 10-13 C, 90-95% RH. The rind goes ivory and finely wrinkled — brain-like rather than velvet — from about day 7.
7. ⭐ Now split the batch, because that is the point of this cheese. Take some at 2 weeks (firm, chalky, mild). Move the rest into small crocks or ramekins at about 3 weeks, before they need them, and let them go to 4 to 6 weeks until the paste is spreadable and then flowing.
8. Keep the crocked ones covered and cold. At full ripeness the cheese will have relaxed into the shape of the pot, which is correct and is why the pot is there.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t 🔴 UNTESTED. 🔴 This is not Saint-Marcellin IGP, protected since 2013 and made in a defined area of the Isère and its neighbours. This is a Saint-Marcellin-style cheese.

🔴 Lactic-set versus rennet-set — the axis nobody explains Every book sorts this family by shape and by rind. The distinction that actually predicts how a cheese eats is how it was coagulated, and there are two answers.

Rennet-set (camembert, brie): a normal dose of rennet, a set in an hour or two, a curd that is cut and handled. Ripened, the paste goes fully molten and runs.

Lactic-set (Chaource, Saint-Marcellin, most fresh goat cheeses): a tiny rennet dose and a very long, mostly acid coagulation — twelve to twenty-four hours — drained by gravity without cutting. Ripened, the outer paste softens but the centre keeps a fragile, chalky, mousse-like core that never becomes liquid.

⭐ So a chalky centre in a Chaource is the cheese working correctly, and a chalky centre in a camembert means it is not ready. Same words, opposite verdicts — and it is the single most useful thing to know before buying or making one.

The crock, and what it admits ⭐ A fully ripe Saint-Marcellin has so little structure left that it slumps. The glazed pot it is sold in — a faisselle, a pot or a small terracotta dish — exists to contain a cheese that has given up on being a solid. It is one of the few pieces of food packaging that is honest about the product’s limitations, and it changes how you plan the make: decide at three weeks which rounds are going into pots, before they need them.

Goat to cow — a protected name that records a change The cheese is historically a goat’s-milk cheese of the Dauphiné, and the shift to cow’s milk happened over the 19th and 20th centuries as dairy herds displaced goats in the region. ⭐ Most protected designations freeze a practice at the moment of registration. This one permits both milks, so the specification carries the history rather than erasing it — a point worth making against the wider argument in this section that the “rules” of cheesemaking are regional habit.

Its larger sibling Saint-Félicien is essentially the same cheese made larger and richer, often with added cream — so it sits between this and a triple crème.

What goes wrong It never firmed enough to unmould: drained too little, or the set was weak — give it longer in the mould rather than more rennet next time. Bitter: too much rennet, which in a three-drop recipe is easy to do. Slimy orange patches: the rind has been colonised by something you did not invite; drop the humidity and wipe with brine.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/soft-ripened-bloomy/ on the site.