Cheese, Vacherin Fribourgeois-Style
⚠ **UNTESTED.** A briefing. 🔴 **First, the correction, because it catches almost everybody: there are TWO completely different Swiss cheeses called Vacherin, and they are not variations of each other.** **Vacherin Mont d'Or** is a **soft, seasonal, spoonable washed-rind cheese bound in a ring of spruce bark**, made only in the colder months, eaten with a spoon out of its own box. It belongs with [the washed rinds](/cheese/makes/washed-rind/) and has nothing to do with this family. **Vacherin Fribourgeois** — this recipe — is a **semi-hard, cooked, pressed cheese**, made year-round, that slices and melts. ⭐ **It is one of the two cheeses in *moitié-moitié***, the Fribourg fondue: **half Gruyère, half Vacherin Fribourgeois.** ⭐ **And that combination is a piece of applied cheese science, not just tradition.** Gruyère brings flavour and a firm, well-developed protein network; Vacherin Fribourgeois brings a **softer paste that flows readily and emulsifies smoothly.** Fondue made with Gruyère alone tends to string and separate. **The blend is doing structural work** — the same logic as blending an aged cheese with a young melter in a sauce, which [the melting page](/cheese/science/melting/) recommends for exactly the same reason.
Cheese Making · Cheese · Dairy · Fermented
⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.
🔴 First, the correction, because it catches almost everybody: there are TWO completely different Swiss cheeses called Vacherin, and they are not variations of each other.
Vacherin Mont d’Or is a soft, seasonal, spoonable washed-rind cheese bound in a ring of spruce bark, made only in the colder months, eaten with a spoon out of its own box. It belongs with the washed rinds and has nothing to do with this family.
Vacherin Fribourgeois — this recipe — is a semi-hard, cooked, pressed cheese, made year-round, that slices and melts. ⭐ It is one of the two cheeses in moitié-moitié, the Fribourg fondue: half Gruyère, half Vacherin Fribourgeois.
⭐ And that combination is a piece of applied cheese science, not just tradition. Gruyère brings flavour and a firm, well-developed protein network; Vacherin Fribourgeois brings a softer paste that flows readily and emulsifies smoothly. Fondue made with Gruyère alone tends to string and separate. The blend is doing structural work — the same logic as blending an aged cheese with a young melter in a sauce, which the melting page recommends for exactly the same reason.
Ingredients
- 3 gallons whole milk (not ultra-pasteurised)
- 3/8 tsp thermophilic culture
- 1/16 tsp Brevibacterium linens, for a light washed rind
- 3/4 tsp calcium chloride solution, if the milk is shop-bought
- 3/4 tsp liquid rennet, single strength, diluted in 1/4 cup cool unchlorinated water
- Saturated brine, calcium-adjusted — see Cheese Brine, Saturated
- 1 quart 3% wash brine, made fresh weekly
Directions
Key ingredients
- Warm to 90 F / 32 C, thermophilic culture and the B. linens, ripen 45 minutes.
- Rennet at a flocculation multiplier of 3. Cut to 3/8 inch — coarser than a Gruyère.
- ⭐ Cook to 108-115 F / 42-46 C over 30 minutes — between raclette and Gruyère, which is exactly where this cheese sits in every other respect too. Hold and stir 30 minutes.
- Drain under the whey, press moderately: ~10 PSI for 1 hour, flip and redress; ~20 PSI for 12 hours.
Brine 10-14 hours per pound, dry the surface for a day.
- Wash the rind lightly — 3% brine, twice a week for a fortnight, then weekly, at 55 F / 13 C, 95% RH. ⚠ A LIGHTER wash than an Appenzeller or a Limburger. This rind should be pale tan and faintly tacky, not orange and sticky.
- Age 3 to 6 months. The paste should be supple and slightly elastic — noticeably softer than a Gruyère-style and firmer than a raclette.
- ⭐ To make moitié-moitié: equal weights of this and a Gruyère-style, grated, with dry white wine, a little cornstarch or kirsch, and garlic in the pot. Add the cheese in handfuls off the boil and stir in a figure of eight. The Vacherin is what stops it stringing.
Notes
Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t 🔴 UNTESTED. 🔴 This is not Vacherin Fribourgeois AOP — and it is emphatically not Vacherin Mont d’Or, which is a different cheese in a different family under a confusingly similar name.
🔴 The cook is hot enough to kill your starter Alpine curd goes to 122–130 °F / 50–54 °C, which is well past the point where a mesophilic culture dies. So these cheeses require thermophilic cultures — Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus helveticus and relatives.
⚠ This is the substitution that ruins the most wheels in home cheesemaking. Put a mesophilic culture in an alpine recipe and you kill your own starter partway through the cook, acidification simply stops, and the recipe will not warn you.
What the hot cook buys is a much drier, more thoroughly contracted curd, which knits into a dense low-moisture body that can be aged for years without drying out or cracking.
🔴 The two Vacherins, since the confusion is nearly universal
| Mont d’Or | Fribourgeois | |
|---|---|---|
| Texture | Soft, spoonable | Semi-hard, sliceable |
| Rind | Washed, bound in spruce bark | Lightly washed |
| Season | Autumn to spring only | Year-round |
| Family | Washed rind | Cooked-pressed |
| Eaten | With a spoon, often baked in its box | Sliced, melted, in fondue |
⚠ A recipe or a shopping list that just says “Vacherin” is ambiguous, and the two are not substitutable in either direction.
⭐ Why moitié-moitié is engineering Fondue needs two things that pull against each other: flavour, which comes with age, and smooth flow, which age destroys — proteolysis cuts the protein network into shorter pieces, and short strands cannot hold an emulsion. Gruyère supplies the first, Vacherin Fribourgeois the second. ⭐ It is the same solution the melting page recommends for a cheese sauce — aged for taste, young for structure — arrived at independently by a Swiss canton some centuries before anybody wrote down why it works.
Read alongside /cheese/makes/cooked-pressed-alpine/ and /cheese/science/melting/ on the site.