Cheese, Triple Crème

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

A triple crème is a bloomy-rind cheese with cream added to the milk before it is set — and it is defined by a number rather than by a place or a technique.

🔴 And the number is not what most people think it is. The French classifications are double crème at 60% and triple crème at 75% fat — but that is fat in DRY MATTER, measured after the water is notionally taken out. A triple crème at 75% matière grasse sur extrait sec is only about 40% fat as you actually eat it, because the cheese is roughly half water. It is extremely rich. It is not three-quarters butter.

⭐ What the added cream does structurally is more interesting than the richness. Fat globules take up room in the protein network without contributing to it, so the network is diluted and weaker. That gives the famous texture — soft, mousse-like, almost whipped — and it also means the cheese has less structure to hold itself together as it ripens, so it goes runny sooner and slides to ammonia faster than a camembert.

So the make is the bloomy make with a shorter fuse.

Ingredients

• 3 quarts whole milk (not ultra-pasteurised)
• 1 quart heavy cream
• 1/8 tsp mesophilic culture
• 1/16 tsp Penicillium candidum
• 1/4 tsp calcium chloride solution, if the milk is shop-bought
• 1/4 tsp liquid rennet, single strength, diluted in 1/4 cup cool unchlorinated water
• 2 tsp fine salt, about 2% of the drained wheel weight
• Two-ply cheese paper for wrapping

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. Blend the cream into the milk cold, then warm the lot to 86 F / 30 C. ⚠ Warm it gently and do not exceed about 165 F at any point — heating cream harder than that denatures the whey proteins onto the casein and gives a grainy set that no amount of care later will fix.
2. Culture and mould go in together, as for Cheese, Camembert-Style. Ripen 60-90 minutes.
3. Rennet at a low dose, flocculation multiplier 5 to 6. ⚠ The set will look and feel weaker than a whole-milk one and that is expected, not a failure — there is proportionally less casein in the vat. Handle it as though it were more fragile, because it is.
4. Ladle without cutting if you can. This curd shatters. Slices lifted straight into the mould lose less fat than cubes do, and fat lost here is the entire point of the cheese running down the drain.
5. ⚠ Expect the whey to look creamy, and expect less of it. A little fat loss is unavoidable. A lot means you cut it or stirred it.
6. Flip on the usual schedule — every 30 minutes for the first hours, then over 12 to 24 hours at 68-72 F. These wheels are heavier for their size and slump readily, so flip a little more often than you would a camembert.

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

7. Ripen at 50-55 F / 10-13 C, 90-95% RH and watch it more closely than a camembert. The bloom arrives on the same schedule, but the paste softens faster.

Wrap and chill at 39-45 F as soon as the coat is full.

8. Eat it at 3 to 5 weeks — earlier than a camembert. 🔴 This is the one in the family most likely to be ruined by patience.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t 🔴 UNTESTED. Standard method. ⚠ This is not Brillat-Savarin, which is a protected name (IGP, 2017); it is a triple-crème-style cheese made the same way.

The number, stated properly, because the labelling misleads French practice measures fat as matière grasse sur extrait sec — fat in the dry matter. Double crème = at least 60% FDM; triple crème = at least 75% FDM. Since a soft cheese is roughly half water, a 75% FDM triple crème is around 40% fat as eaten. ⭐ Compare butter at about 80% and heavy cream at 36% and the number stops sounding absurd — a triple crème is roughly as fatty as a rich cream cheese, not a stick of butter.

Where the style came from It is a 20th-century French invention rather than a peasant tradition. Brillat-Savarin was created in the 1930s and named for the gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who died a century before it existed — a naming decision, not a provenance. Explorateur (1958) and Saint-André belong to the same wave. ⭐ This is a family invented for a market that wanted richness, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than implying an ancient lineage.

🔴 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.

What goes wrong Grainy paste: the cream was overheated. Greasy rind, or fat weeping: ripened too warm. Collapsed and running at three weeks: normal for the style — eat it. Ammonia early: this family gets there faster than any other bloomy; wrap sooner and colder.

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