Cheese, Morbier-Style

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

Morbier is the one with a dark line running through the middle, and that line is a fossil of a working practice rather than a flavouring.

⭐ What it originally was: soot. In the Jura, a farm with a small herd could not fill a Comté-sized vat in one milking. So the evening’s curd went into the mould, and — to stop a skin forming and to keep flies off it overnight — the surface was rubbed with soot scraped from the bottom of the cauldron. In the morning the second milking’s curd went on top, and the black layer stayed where it was.

🔴 Today it is vegetable ash, it is added in a single make, and it does nothing at all. The two-milking practice is gone; the line survives because people expect it. A working solution became a decoration, and the decoration is now the identifying feature.

That is worth sitting with, because this section keeps finding it: the object survived after its function changed.

Technically Morbier is a hybrid — a pressed, semi-soft cheese with a washed rind — so it sits between this family and the semi-soft washed-curd cheeses.

Ingredients

• 3 gallons whole milk (not ultra-pasteurised)
• 3/8 tsp thermophilic culture
• 1/16 tsp Brevibacterium linens
• 3/4 tsp calcium chloride solution, if the milk is shop-bought
• 3/4 tsp liquid rennet, single strength, diluted in 1/4 cup cool unchlorinated water
• 1/4 tsp food-grade vegetable ash, OR 1/2 tsp fine activated charcoal
• Saturated brine, calcium-adjusted — see Cheese Brine, Saturated
• 1 quart 3% wash brine, made fresh weekly
• 1 round mould with a follower, about 8 inches

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. Warm the milk to 92 F / 33 C. Thermophilic culture here, not mesophilic — Morbier is cooked warmer than the rest of this family and shares its bacteriology with its Jura neighbours. Ripen 45 minutes.
2. Rennet at a flocculation multiplier of 3, then cut to 1/4 to 3/8 inch — much finer than a Taleggio. Stir while raising to 102 F / 39 C over 30 minutes and hold until the curd is firm. This is a real cook and a real press; that is what makes it a hybrid.
3. ⭐ Now the layer, and the only trick in the recipe. Fill the mould halfway, press the surface flat, and dust it evenly with vegetable ash through a fine sieve. A thin, even veil — not a thick black band. Then fill the rest of the mould on top and press.
4. ⚠ Too much ash and the two halves will not knit, and you get a wheel that splits along the line when you cut it. The line should be a line, not a layer.
5. Press moderately for 12 hours, flipping and redressing two or three times — around 10-15 PSI on the follower. See the presses page for what that means on your kit.
6. Brine 8-10 hours per pound, then dry the surface for a day.

The wash itself — this is the make.

1. • A 3% brine: 1 oz salt to a quart of water, kept in the fridge, made fresh weekly.
2. • Add the surface culture to the first two or three washes only.
3. • Wipe every face and the edge with a cloth or your hand wrung nearly dry. Damp, not soaked.
4. • Every 2-3 days for the first three weeks, then weekly.
5. • 55 F / 13 C, 95% RH throughout.
6. ⚠ You are not cleaning it, you are farming it. Wiping spreads the culture around and reopens the rind so it can breathe. A rind left alone grows the wrong things.
7. Ripen 2 to 3 months at 50-55 F. The rind goes pale orange and slightly tacky. The paste should be supple and springy — this is a bendy cheese, not a runny one, because it was pressed.
8. Cut it across the line. If the ash was even and the halves knitted, you get the unmistakable cross-section and no seam.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t 🔴 UNTESTED. ⚠ This is not Morbier AOP, protected since 2000 and made in the Jura to a defined method. This is a Morbier-style cheese.

⭐ The line: what it was, and what it is Was: soot from the underside of the cauldron, spread on the evening curd to protect it overnight until the morning milking arrived. A farm with too few cows to fill a Comté vat made this instead. Is: food-grade vegetable ash, applied in one make, purely visual.

🔴 The honest framing is that the modern cheese quotes the old one. It is not a fake and it is not a tradition either — it is a memorial. This collection has met the same shape several times (the vessel-as-ingredient ledger is full of it): the object survived after its function changed.

🔴 Why the wash schedule is really a yeast schedule Brevibacterium linens — the organism that makes the orange colour, the tacky surface and the smell — needs a surface pH of roughly 5.5 and above. A cheese coming out of the mould has a rind at about 4.9. So on day one there is nothing up there that B. linens can live on, and washing it with a brine full of B. linens achieves very little.

What happens first is yeast. Debaryomyces hansenii and Geotrichum candidum are salt-tolerant and acid-tolerant, and they eat lactic acid. As they consume it the surface pH climbs, and somewhere in the first one to two weeks the rind crosses 5.5 — and only then does the bacterium you actually wanted have somewhere to grow.

⭐ So the commonest complaint about this family has a specific answer. “I washed it faithfully and it never went orange” almost always means the surface never deacidified: too dry, too cold, too salty, or the wheel over-acidified in the vat and started from too far down.

Why it is a hybrid, and why that matters to the make Morbier is cooked warmer and pressed harder than a Taleggio or a Reblochon, which is why the paste is springy rather than yielding, and why it keeps for months rather than weeks. It is a semi-soft pressed cheese that happens to have a washed rind — so if you have made a gouda, most of this make will feel familiar and only the wash schedule will be new.

What goes wrong It split along the line: too much ash, or the second layer went on too cold. A grey smear instead of a line: ash dusted unevenly or disturbed while filling. No orange rind: the pH problem in the note above. Cracks in the paste: over-pressed, or the cave is too dry — this one wants ~90% RH, higher than a cheddar.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/washed-rind/ and /cheese/makes/semi-soft-washed-curd/ on the site.