Cheese, Crottin-Style

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

A crottin is a small goat round, about 60 grams — roughly the size of a large walnut — and it is the one cheese in this family designed to be eaten across a whole range of ages rather than at a single window.

⭐ That is the reason to make it, and it is unusual. The French sell it by stage: frais (fresh, white, mild), demi-sec (half-dry, firmer, nutty), sec (dry, hard, sharp) and très sec (very dry, shrunken, blue-grey and intensely goaty). Same cheese, four products, and you get all four out of one make by taking rounds off the shelf as the weeks pass.

It is also the most forgiving entry to this family, because small ripens fast. A camembert makes you wait five weeks to find out whether you were right. A crottin tells you in ten days.

The rind is usually Geotrichum-dominant rather than a dense white P. candidum coat — finer, wrinkled, brain-like, and it goes ivory then grey-blue as it dries.

Ingredients

• 1 gallon goat milk (not ultra-pasteurised)
• 1/8 tsp mesophilic culture, or a chèvre culture that includes Geotrichum candidum
• 1/16 tsp Geotrichum candidum, if not already in the culture
• 1/4 tsp calcium chloride solution, if the milk is shop-bought
• 2 drops liquid rennet, single strength, diluted in 1/4 cup cool unchlorinated water
• 2 tsp fine salt
• 6-8 small straight-sided moulds, about 2 inches across

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. Warm the goat milk to 72 F / 22 C — room temperature, no more. ⭐ This is a LACTIC set, not a rennet set, and the difference is the whole character of the cheese. Add calcium chloride if the milk is shop-bought; goat milk makes a weaker gel than cow’s to begin with.
2. Culture it, and add the Geotrichum. Stir right through.
3. Two drops of rennet, diluted. Two, for a whole gallon. The rennet is not making the cheese; the acid is. It is there so the curd holds together enough to ladle.
4. Cover and leave 12 to 18 hours at room temperature, until you have a firm yogurt-like set with clear whey standing on top.
5. Ladle into the small moulds — do not cut. Slices lifted whole. They will sink a long way; top them up. Drain 24 to 48 hours at room temperature, flipping once they are firm enough to handle (usually after about 12 hours).
6. Unmould and dry-salt all over, about 2% by weight. Then leave them on a rack until the surface is dry to the touch.
7. Ripen at 50-55 F / 10-13 C — but drier than a camembert, around 85% RH. ⚠ This is the one place these rounds differ sharply from a big bloomy wheel: they are meant to lose water, not hold it. Too humid and you get a slimy coat instead of a wrinkled one.
8. Now eat them on a schedule. Day 7-10 frais — white, soft, lactic. 2-3 weeks demi-sec — a fine wrinkled rind, firm centre. 4-6 weeks sec — hard, dense, sharp. 8 weeks très sec — shrunken, grey-blue, and very strong.
9. Take notes on which stage you liked. That is the entire point of making a cheese that comes in four.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t 🔴 UNTESTED. 🔴 This is not Crottin de Chavignol, an AOP cheese from the Sancerre area of the Loire with its own defined method and area. Plain crottin describes the format and is free to use; the Chavignol name is not.

⚠ The name, and the two derivations that compete The obvious reading of crottin in modern French is horse dung, and plenty of sources cheerfully give that as the etymology, pointing at the shape and at the dark grey-brown colour of a très sec round.

The Chavignol tradition gives a different one: crot in the local Berrichon dialect meant a small earthenware oil lamp, and the little clay moulds used for the cheese were the same shape. ⚠ I cannot settle which is right, and I would be suspicious of anyone who says they can — the two are not even incompatible, since a word can acquire a second meaning and the joke can arrive later. Both are recorded here; neither is asserted.

🔴 Lactic-set versus rennet-set — the axis nobody explains Every book sorts this family by shape and by rind. The distinction that actually predicts how a cheese eats is how it was coagulated, and there are two answers.

Rennet-set (camembert, brie): a normal dose of rennet, a set in an hour or two, a curd that is cut and handled. Ripened, the paste goes fully molten and runs.

Lactic-set (Chaource, Saint-Marcellin, most fresh goat cheeses): a tiny rennet dose and a very long, mostly acid coagulation — twelve to twenty-four hours — drained by gravity without cutting. Ripened, the outer paste softens but the centre keeps a fragile, chalky, mousse-like core that never becomes liquid.

⭐ So a chalky centre in a Chaource is the cheese working correctly, and a chalky centre in a camembert means it is not ready. Same words, opposite verdicts — and it is the single most useful thing to know before buying or making one.

Why small changes everything Ripening is a surface-inward process, so the time to ripen scales with the distance from rind to centre. A 60 g round has perhaps three-quarters of an inch to travel; a camembert has twice that, and a brie-sized wheel more again. ⭐ That is why a crottin is ready in days while a camembert takes weeks, and it is also why a crottin can be pushed to très sec without the middle turning to ammonia — there is barely a middle.

Sourcing and gear Small moulds are cheap and the only special kit. Goat milk from a farm behaves far better than the shelf-stable cartons, which are usually UHT and will not set at all. Cow’s milk works and makes a decent small bloomy round; it is not a crottin.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/soft-ripened-bloomy/, /cheese/makes/fresh-and-acid-set/ and /cheese/milk/ on the site.