Recipes

    Brined & Pickled

    Feta, halloumi, telemea, nabulsi, Domiati, sirene, mish. The cheeses that age submerged rather than in air — and that one difference changes everything downstream.

    This is also, geographically, the family that most undercuts the idea of a European cheese heartland. Its centre of gravity is the eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Levant and North Africa.

    Ageing in liquid instead of air

    Every other aged cheese in this section develops a rind — because its surface is exposed to air, it dries, and something grows on it. Brined cheeses never do, because there is no air at the surface.

    The consequences:

    No rind, and they stay white. No surface drying, no mould, no B. linens, no bloom.

    They don’t dry out. The salt does the preservation that evaporation would otherwise do, so the paste stays moist indefinitely.

    They get saltier over time, not just at the start, because salt continues to diffuse inward from the brine.

    And they keep a long time without a cave. Which is the point, and the reason the family exists where it does: in a hot climate without refrigeration, a cheese submerged in strong brine in a sealed jar keeps when an air-aged wheel would not.

    That’s the same problem the whole history wing keeps circling — how do you keep milk — solved with the tool the climate offered. Not a cool damp cellar; a lot of salt.

    🔴 Which is why the brine chemistry actually matters

    If the brine is the aging environment, then getting the brine wrong ruins the cheese — and this is where the salt and pH warning becomes concrete.

    A cheese is held together by calcium. Put it in a brine with no calcium and the calcium leaves the cheese for the brine until equilibrium — pulling the mortar out of a brick wall — and the surface goes soft and slimy.

    For a wheel you brine for a few hours before waxing, that’s a minor defect. For a cheese that lives in brine for months, it’s fatal. So:

    • 0.1–0.3% calcium chloride in the brine, commonly 0.25% — 2.5 g per litre;
    • brine pH lowered to around 5.0, near the cheese’s own, since a pH mismatch causes the same sliminess;
    • and maintained, because whey leaching out of the cheese dilutes the brine over time.

    This is the single most useful practical thing on this page, and it is the reason home-made feta so often disappoints in the second month.

    Feta and halloumi are opposites

    Both refuse to melt. They do it for opposite reasons, and this is the clearest demonstration of the calcium mechanism anywhere in the wing.

    Feta is a low-pH cheese. Its acidity means it lost most of its colloidal calcium phosphate during the make, so it has few calcium cross-links left. Heated, it has neither enough structure to flow nor enough to hold — it softens and crumbles.

    Halloumi is a high-pH cheese, made with rennet and often with added calcium, and heated during the make — so it is heavily cross-linked. Heated again in a pan, it will not flow at all: it holds its shape, browns, and squeaks. The squeak is the intact protein network resisting your teeth.

    So one crumbles because its calcium left, and the other holds because its calcium stayed. Substituting one for the other fails in a specific, predictable direction.

    The members

    Feta. Greece and Cyprus only — PDO since 2002, and the subject of the 2022 European Court judgment against Denmark for producing “Feta” for export outside the EU. Sheep’s milk, or sheep with up to 30% goat.

    Halloumi. Cyprus, and now protected: the EU registered Χαλλούμι (Halloumi) / Hellim as a PDO in April 2021, with protection taking effect 1 October 2021 — so it can now only be produced in Cyprus. Notably the registration covers both the Greek and Turkish Cypriot names, and the first Turkish Cypriot halloumi/hellim was certified under it in March 2023. A cheese doing diplomatic work.

    Telemea. Romanian and Balkan, feta-adjacent, often from sheep or a blend.

    Sirene. Bulgarian, the same broad idea, and a staple rather than a specialty.

    Nabulsi. Palestinian, from Nablus, often flavoured with mahlab and nigella seed, and — like halloumi — it holds its shape when fried.

    Domiati. Egyptian, and unusual in that salt is added to the milk before renneting rather than afterwards, which changes the curd’s behaviour from the start.

    Mish. Egyptian, and the outlier: left in brine for years, developing an extremely pungent character. One of the cheeses on the uncommon list that a general cheese book will never mention.

    🔴 Making one — and I have a position on the milk

    I’ve made feta from both cow’s milk and goat’s milk, and I’ve landed firmly on one side: a good feta should be goat, and goat is all I normally use now.

    Let me be fair about the status of that. The PDO specification is sheep’s milk, or sheep with up to 30% goat — so the traditional definition doesn’t actually back me up, and cow’s-milk feta is a perfectly legitimate cheese that plenty of people prefer. This is a preference, not an appeal to authority.

    But the goat version has a clean sharpness the cow version doesn’t, and having made both there wasn’t much argument left as far as my kitchen is concerned. And the reason isn’t anything I did: goat milk has a different fatty-acid profile, so lipolysis produces a different set of compounds. Goat cheese tastes specifically of goat because of what’s in the milk before you start.

    Feta or a feta-style cheese is also an excellent early project — arguably better than cheddar as a second cheese after the fresh ones.

    Why: the make is a straightforward rennet curd, gently handled, drained, cut into blocks and put into brine. No press required, no rind to manage, no cave conditions to hold — a jar in a refrigerator is a perfectly good aging environment because the brine is doing the work.

    The one thing to get right is the brine, per above. And the one thing to expect: it will get saltier than you think over the first weeks, so err on the light side and let diffusion do the rest.

    Halloumi is also very achievable and unusually satisfying, because the stretch-adjacent heating step and the squeak make it obvious you’ve made something with a real structure.

    How to make one: Making brined & pickled cheese — the brine that has to contain calcium, and the forty minutes that make halloumi halloumi.

    Next: whey cheeses — a second cheese from what you were about to pour away.

    Sources

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