Recipes

    Spain & Portugal

    Some of the best cheeses in Europe are made here, and a remarkable number of them are not set with rennet at all. They are set with a thistle flower.

    That is the page, and it turns out to answer a question I left open two pages ago.

    Why Iberian cheese is the way it is

    Heat, thin soil, and mountains where the plain gives out. Cattle struggle across most of the peninsula; sheep and goats do not. So Iberia is overwhelmingly a sheep and goat cheese region, which is unusual in Europe and is exactly what the milk wing predicts from the climate.

    And the summers are long and dry, so the cheeses divide sharply: hard pressed sheep cheeses that keep (Manchego, Zamorano, Roncal, Idiazabal), and soft spoonable ones eaten in season — which is where the thistle comes in.

    ⭐ Cardoon: the coagulant that is a flower

    Torta del Casar and La Serena in Extremadura, and Serra da Estrela, Azeitão and Serpa in Portugal, are coagulated with the dried flower of the cardoon thistle, Cynara cardunculus. The flowers are steeped in water, and the extract is added to warm sheep’s milk exactly as you would add rennet.

    This is not a modern vegetarian workaround. Cardoon flower has been used since ancient times in Portuguese farmhouse sheep-cheese making, and these are among the most prized cheeses on the peninsula. The result is typically a wheel bound in cloth whose interior goes so soft that you cut the top off and eat it with a spoon.

    What’s actually in the flower

    The clotting activity comes from cardosins A and B, two aspartic proteases — and their specificities are startlingly convenient:

    • Cardosin A is similar in activity and specificity to chymosin.
    • Cardosin B is similar in activity and specificity to pepsin.

    So the plant independently arrived at both of the enzymes animal rennet uses, in one flower. Which is a fact worth sitting with for a moment: the two protein families most associated with a calf’s stomach have close functional analogues in a Mediterranean thistle.

    🔴 And this partly resolves the Farindola problem

    On the Italy page I raised a tension I said I couldn’t settle. Pecorino di Farindola is set with pig rennet — pepsin rather than chymosin — and per the rennet page a broadly proteolytic coagulant is the textbook cause of bitterness in aged cheese. Yet the makers say it is sweeter and never bitter. I bet on my mechanism being incomplete rather than on their palates.

    The cardoon literature says my mechanism was incomplete. Cardoon participates in both coagulation and proteolysis, and cheese made with cardoon was found to have a softer texture, a higher degree of proteolysis, and a less bitter taste than the same cheese made with animal rennet.

    More proteolysis, less bitterness. The two do not move together.

    Which means the rule I was leaning on — more general proteolysis → more bitterness — is too coarse. Bitterness in cheese comes from particular hydrophobic peptides, not from the total quantity of protein broken down. A protease with different cleavage specificity can be more active overall and still produce fewer of the peptides that taste bitter.

    So the honest revision:

    What I said on the rennet page still holds for choosing a coagulant — a high clotting-to-proteolysis ratio is what you want, and it is why camel chymosin is a good coagulant for cheddar.

    But “high proteolysis therefore bitter” is not a law, and I used it as one. Cardoon is the counterexample, and it is a well-studied one. Farindola’s pig rennet may be doing the same thing: a different specificity, not merely a blunter version of chymosin.

    ⚠ I still can’t close Farindola specifically — nobody has run cardoon’s comparison on pig rennet as far as I found. What’s changed is that the makers’ claim is no longer mechanistically implausible, which is what I was treating it as.

    That is the second time in this wing that going one region further has corrected something I wrote in the last one. I’d rather leave the trail visible than quietly edit the earlier page.

    Where cheese is aged, again

    Cabrales (Asturias) is a blue ripened in natural limestone caves in the Picos de Europa — not a temperature-controlled room built to imitate a cave, an actual cave, whose humidity and resident flora do the work.

    By now this is the most consistent pattern in the world tour, and it deserves stating as a rule: fir bark, chestnut leaves, tufa pits, spruce bands, goatskins, buried clay pots, limestone caves — across every region, the vessel is an ingredient. See ripening. Modern cheesemaking’s instinct is to make the environment inert and controllable; the traditional instinct was the exact opposite, and it is where a great deal of the flavour came from.

    For my own cave — a concrete-walled corner of a Michigan basement — that cuts both ways. Cement on three sides is inert, which is safe and dull.

    The ones worth knowing

    Torta del Casar and Queso de La Serena (Extremadura) — cardoon-set raw sheep’s milk, cloth-bound, and so soft inside that the serving method is to cut a lid off the top. Bitter-edged, intense, and nothing else in Europe eats quite like them.

    Serra da Estrela (Portugal) — cardoon-set sheep’s milk from the Bordaleira and Churra breeds, and Portugal’s great cheese. The cardoon ecotype used measurably affects the finished cheese, which is terroir applied to the coagulant rather than to the milk — an idea I had not met anywhere else.

    Azeitão and Serpa — the smaller Portuguese cardoon cheeses in the same idiom.

    ⭐ The formulas are written, including how to make and use the cardoon extract: Cheese, Serra da Estrela-Style and Cheese, Torta del Casar-Style — the same coagulant taken to two completely different places by handling alone.

    Cabrales (Asturias) — per above. Wrapped traditionally in maple leaves, now in foil, and blued through with an aggression that makes Roquefort look polite.

    Afuega’l Pitu (Asturias) — a cone or pumpkin-shaped fresh-to-semi-cured cow’s cheese, often kneaded through with paprika so it comes out brick red. The Asturian name is usually glossed as something like “chokes the throat,” which tells you about the texture. ⚠ Treat the etymology as folk gloss.

    Majorero (Fuerteventura) — goat’s-milk, and the rind is traditionally rubbed with gofio, the Canaries’ toasted grain flour, or with paprika or oil. A rind treatment that exists nowhere else because the ingredient exists nowhere else — see rind treatment.

    Queso Palmero (La Palma) — goat’s milk, smoked over almond shells, prickly-pear or pine, and made in enormous wheels for an island cheese.

    Idiazabal (Basque Country) — pressed sheep’s milk, often smoked, historically because the cheeses hung in the shepherds’ huts. The smoke was a side effect of the accommodation before it was a style.

    Mahón (Menorca) — cow’s milk, and unusual for Spain in being so; matured wrapped in cloth and rubbed with oil and paprika, giving that orange, squared-off wheel.

    Tetilla (Galicia) — cow’s milk, mild, and shaped exactly as its name says.

    Garrotxa (Catalonia) — a goat’s-milk tomme with a grey-blue natural rind, and a good example of a modern revival: it was effectively extinct and was brought back in the 1980s.

    São Jorge (Azores) — a hard cow’s-milk cheese, and a genuine historical curiosity: the Azorean dairy tradition traces to Flemish settlers in the fifteenth century, so a cheese made mid-Atlantic belongs by descent to the Low Countries rather than to Portugal.

    Requeijão — the Portuguese whey cheese, the local ricotta, and the by-product cheese that every good dairy region has.

    What to take to the bench

    ⭐ Cardoon is the most interesting thing on this page for a home cheesemaker, and it is obtainable — dried cardoon or thistle flower is sold as a vegetarian coagulant, and it is a genuinely different tool rather than a substitute. Expect a softer paste and more proteolysis than animal rennet gives you, which per above is a feature.

    ⚠ It is not interchangeable dose-for-dose with rennet, and it behaves differently in sheep’s milk than in cow’s — these are sheep’s-milk cheeses for a reason. See cultures and rennet sourcing; this is one to run as an experiment with notes, not as a swap in a known recipe.

    And paprika, oil and toasted flour are rind treatments. My own kit has wax and a brush and nothing else. Rubbing a natural rind with paprika and oil costs nothing and is four hundred years old.

    Next in this wing: Germany, Scandinavia, and then east.

    Sources

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