Making Blue Cheese

Every other cheese in this section is trying to knit the curd into a closed body with no air in it. Blue does the opposite on purpose, and the family page makes that argument.

This page is the make, and the practical version of the same idea is this: almost everything you have learned about good curd handling gets inverted here, deliberately.

The one thing: you are building a cheese full of holes

Penicillium roqueforti is aerobic. Add it to the milk and it will sit in the finished wheel doing absolutely nothing, because a well-made cheese has no oxygen in it.

So the make is arranged to give it some, in two stages:

A loose, open, badly-knit curd. Minimal cutting, gentle stirring, no press or a token one, sometimes curds stacked in layers rather than compressed. What you want is a body full of tiny voids and irregular junctions.

And then the needles. Weeks later, the wheel is pierced through with long needles — dozens of channels, both faces. Air reaches the interior, the dormant mould wakes up, and it grows along the channels. That’s why the veining follows lines: it’s a map of where the needles went.

The make, step by step

1. Milk, culture, mould. A gallon at 86–90 °F / 30–32 °C. Mesophilic culture and P. roqueforti — powdered, sprinkled on the surface and stirred through. Calcium chloride if the milk is shop-bought.

⚠ Dose the mould lightly. More spores does not give better veining; it gives you a cheese that over-blues and turns bitter and soapy. A pinch per gallon is genuinely the instruction.

2. Ripen 60–90 minutes, then rennet. Flocculation multiplier around 4 — softer than a cheddar, firmer than a bloomy rind.

3. Cut to ½–¾ inch, and stir as little as you can bear. No cook, or a very gentle one to the set temperature. You are not trying to expel whey efficiently. You are trying to end up with curd pieces that will sit against each other rather than fuse.

4. Drain in the mould, unpressed. Ladle the curd in — traditionally in layers, dusting a little extra mould between them if you want emphatic veining. Straight-sided moulds, draining mat, and let gravity do it.

5. Flip often, every hour or two for the first several hours, then a few more times over 24 hours at 65–68 °F / 18–20 °C. An unpressed wheel slumps if you don’t.

6. Dry-salt heavily, over several days. Roughly 3% of the wheel weight, applied to the surfaces in two or three passes rather than all at once, flipping between.

⭐ Blues are dry-salted rather than brined, and the reason is structural. A brine adds water to the rind and closes the surface; heavy dry salting draws moisture out and leaves a surface that can still breathe. On a high-moisture, deliberately open cheese, both of those matter — and heavy salt is also one of your two brakes on a mould that would otherwise run away with the wheel.

7. Rest 1–2 weeks at 50–55 °F / 10–13 °C, 90–95% RH. Flip daily. The surface will start to grow things; wipe the rind with a dry cloth or a little dry salt to keep it in order.

8. Needle. At 7 to 14 days — when the wheel is firm enough to hold a channel open rather than closing behind the needle. A sanitised skewer or a proper blue needle, driven the full depth, 30 to 50 holes per face, worked around the wheel evenly.

Veining appears within days. A second needling at around three weeks opens it further if the blue is shy.

9. Age 8–12 weeks minimum, and considerably longer for a Stilton-style or Roquefort-style. When it has as much blue as you want, wrap it in foil — that cuts the oxygen and effectively stops the mould where it is.

What “right” looks like

Veining in lines and pockets, not a uniform wash of colour. Blue-green, following the channels and the natural voids.

A moist, crumbly, slightly open paste, creamier near the veins where proteolysis has been fastest.

A sharp, peppery flavour with a distinct salty edge, which is lipolysis producing free fatty acids. That’s the same mechanism as provolone’s bite, run much further.

What goes wrong

No blue, or only at the rind. The commonest failure, and the diagnosis order is: curd too tightly knit (you pressed it, or stirred it too hard, or cut too fine) → not needled, or needled too early and the channels closed → too much salt → not enough spores → too cold.

Too much blue, bitter or soapy. Over-blued. Excess spores, needled too aggressively, or aged past the point. Foil earlier next time.

Slimy, orange or pink rind. Surface flora winning. Dry-salt the rind, drop the humidity slightly, wipe it down.

The paste went to paste. P. roqueforti is aggressively proteolytic and a high-moisture wheel can break down faster than you expect. Colder, drier, foil sooner.

🔴 And it got into everything else. P. roqueforti produces enormous numbers of spores and they travel. Once blue is aging in a small shared space, expect to find it colonising the rinds of things that were never meant to be blue. I’ve written the honest options on the family page: a separate space if you can, otherwise run blue in batches and clean thoroughly afterwards, or keep the wheels in their own sealed container inside the cave. Worth knowing before you start rather than after — particularly if, like me, you have one cave and one fridge and everything shares.

The members, and what changes

🔴 Naming, which matters more in this family than any other. You cannot make Roquefort outside Roquefort-sur-Soulzon — the PDO protects the right to ripen in those caves, and the claim goes back to a charter of 1411. So everything below is -style, and the bare name stays with the real thing.

Stilton-style. Cow’s milk, higher-fat, dry-salted, a natural crusty rind, three months plus. Note the legal curiosity already covered on the English story: the PDO forbids raw milk, which is why Stichelton — made inside the qualifying counties, to the same method, with raw milk — cannot use the name.

Gorgonzola-style. Two quite different cheeses under one word: dolce is young, soft and barely blue; piccante is aged, firmer and much more assertive. Decide which you’re making before you start, because they diverge at the salt and the schedule.

Roquefort-style. Sheep’s milk if you can get it, and it is a genuinely different cheese with cow’s milk. Heavily salted, aged around five months.

Cambozola-style. Blue veining and a bloomy rind and added cream. A deliberate hybrid, often sneered at, and good at what it’s for — but note it means running two moulds at once, which is a real step up in cave management.

Where I stand

I’ve dabbled in blue, and that’s the word I used on the family page and the word I’ll keep here. Of all the families on this site it’s the one I’ve explored least, so read this as informed rather than authoritative.

What I will say is that blue is unusual in being technically approachable and logistically annoying. The make is arguably easier than a bloomy rind — you’re not managing a delicate surface, and gentle handling plus generous salt plus a needle covers most of it. The problem is the spores in your cave, and no amount of technique fixes that.

The formulas

All six are written, and between them they cover four completely different ways of protecting a name:

Cheese, Stilton-Style — 🔴 the PDO that forbids raw milk, which is why Stichelton is made inside the qualifying counties and still can’t use the word. The disqualifier is process, not place
Cheese, Gorgonzola-Style — two cheeses under one word. Dolce and piccante diverge at the salt and the schedule, so decide before you start
Cheese, Roquefort-Style — ⭐⭐ the PDO that protects the right to RIPEN there, not to make there. The thing being protected is a basement — ventilated by fleurines, natural fissures left by a landslide
Cheese, Cambozola-Style — ⭐ the only cheese in this section protected by TRADEMARK rather than origin. A PDO protects a practice; a trademark protects a business
Cheese, Cabrales-Style — a protected cheese whose specification accommodates variation rather than freezing it: three milks, in whatever proportion the season gives you
Cheese, Lanark-Style — the one with a court case attached, and where the raw-milk fight lands on one farm rather than on a designation

⚠ All six are UNTESTED as these specific styles. I have made blue — dabbled is my word and I am keeping it — and I could not tell you which one it was.

⭐ And three of the six carry an honest photo substitution, because Commons has no usable picture of Cambozola, Cabrales or Lanark Blue that isn’t retail packaging. Each caption names what the photograph actually shows. The Cambozola one is almost too neat: it is a rival brand’s blue-and-bloomy, which is exactly what a trademark means.

But two auxiliaries every make on this page needs are written: Cheese Culture, Mesophilic Mother and Cheese Brine, Saturated — and the brine one is the more important of the two, because a plain salt brine takes a good cheese apart in about a week.

Next: semi-soft washed-curd — gouda, edam and the trick of robbing your own bacteria of their food.