Washed Rinds

The orange, sticky, magnificently smelly ones. Époisses, Taleggio, Limburger, Munster, Reblochon, and the Trappist cheeses — the family that clears a refrigerator.

Like the bloomy rinds, these are ripened from the outside in. The difference is who is doing it, and it isn’t a mould.

B. linens, and why it smells like that

The organism is Brevibacterium linens, a bacterium rather than a fungus, and it is responsible for both the colour — orange to brick-red — and the smell.

About that smell: B. linens is closely related to organisms that live on human skin, and produces some of the same compounds. The comparison to feet is not a coarse joke; it is chemically the correct observation. Which is worth knowing because it explains why the smell is so specifically what it is, rather than just generically strong.

And the smell is not the taste. This is the thing to tell somebody who won’t try one. A washed-rind cheese tastes far milder, sweeter and beefier than it smells — the pungent compounds are volatile and mostly go up your nose rather than onto your tongue. Époisses smells alarming and tastes rich and savoury.

Why you wash them

The washing is what makes the family, and it does two jobs at once.

It keeps the surface moist and salty, which is what B. linens wants — and, crucially, what most of its competitors don’t. You are not just feeding your organism; you are creating conditions that disadvantage everything else.

And it physically disrupts other growth. Wiping the wheel repeatedly knocks back moulds trying to establish, so the bacterium wins the surface.

What you wash with varies and is not merely decorative: brine most commonly, but also beer, wine, cider, marc or spirits, each contributing flavour as well as moisture.

A washed rind should be tacky and orange, not furry. If it’s grown fluff, something else has taken the surface — see rinds and moulds.

Geotrichum candidum is often involved too, deacidifying the surface first, since B. linens prefers a less acidic surface than a fresh cheese offers.

The members

Époisses. Burgundy, washed with marc de Bourgogne, sold in a little wooden box because at full ripeness it will not hold itself together without one.

Taleggio. Italian, square, milder than its smell suggests, and the most approachable entry to the family.

Limburger. The one with the reputation, and the direct ancestor — by way of a Swiss immigrant in 1877 Wisconsin — of brick cheese, which is why a Detroit pizza has that caramelised edge.

Munster (the French Alsatian one, not the mild American cheese that borrowed the name).

Reblochon. Savoyard, and the essential ingredient of tartiflette.

Herve. Belgian, PDO, and pungent even by this family’s standards.

The Trappist cheeses — Chimay, Maroilles, Port-Salut and relatives. Monastic association is strong here, though as the monasteries page says, the claim that monks invented the washed rind is an association I cannot find primary evidence for. They certainly made and popularised them.

Making one

The hardest family for a home cheesemaker, and I’d put it after bloomy rinds rather than before.

The make is a straightforward high-moisture rennet curd. The difficulty is a schedule: the wheel needs washing every few days for weeks, at high humidity, and the surface has to stay in a narrow band between “developing nicely” and “slimy”. Miss a few washes and moulds move in; overdo it and you get a wet, slipping surface.

It also has a social cost, which I mention because nobody else does: it will make your cave smell of washed-rind cheese, and the smell gets onto other cheeses aging nearby. Along with blue’s travelling spores, this is an argument for the separate-space discipline that I don’t actually have — one cave and a fridge, everything shared.

How to make one: Making washed-rind cheese — why the first fortnight of washing is a yeast schedule rather than a bacterial one.

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Next: semi-soft washed-curd cheeses — where the water goes in rather than out.