Cheese, Reblochon-Style

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

⭐⭐ Reblochon is named after tax evasion, and the fraud is the reason the cheese is good.

In the Savoie, tenant farmers were taxed by their landlords on the volume of milk their herds produced. So they did not fully milk the cows while the landlord’s agent was watching — and then, once he had gone, milked them again. The Savoyard word for that second, furtive milking is reblocher, roughly to pinch again.

🔴 And here is why it matters rather than just being a good anecdote: the second draw is genuinely richer. Fat content rises through a milking — the last milk out of the udder carries substantially more of it than the first. So the milk the farmers were hiding was the fattiest milk they had, and the cheese they made from it on the quiet was better than the one they were declaring.

A tax dodge selected for a superior raw material. That is the whole cheese.

⚠ And it is why you cannot buy the real thing in the United States. Reblochon ripens in about six to eight weeks, which is under the FDA’s 60-day minimum for raw-milk cheese.

Ingredients

• 2 gallons whole milk (not ultra-pasteurised) — the richest you can get
• 1/4 tsp mesophilic culture
• 1/16 tsp Brevibacterium linens
• 1/16 tsp Geotrichum candidum or a yeast blend
• 1/2 tsp calcium chloride solution, if the milk is shop-bought
• 1/2 tsp liquid rennet, single strength, diluted in 1/4 cup cool unchlorinated water
• Saturated brine, calcium-adjusted — see Cheese Brine, Saturated
• 1 quart 3% wash brine, made fresh weekly
• 2 round moulds, about 5 inches across

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. ⭐ Use the richest milk you can get, and if you have any say in it, ask for the END of the milking. That is the historical point of the cheese and it is not a romantic one — fat rises through a milking, and this recipe is built around the fatty end of it.
2. Warm to 90 F / 32 C, mesophilic culture plus the surface flora, ripen 45 minutes.
3. Rennet at a flocculation multiplier of about 3 1/2. Cut to 3/4 inch — coarser than a Taleggio — and stir very gently while raising to only 95 F / 35 C. Barely a cook, and the coarse cut keeps the moisture that gives Reblochon its supple, almost yielding paste.
4. Drain and mould with a light press, a few pounds only, flipping every half hour for the first two or three hours and then over 12 hours at 68 F.
5. Brief brine — about 1 hour — or a light dry salt, then dry the surface overnight.

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 6 to 8 weeks at 55 F. The rind develops a fine downy white bloom over the orange smear — ⚠ that white coat is correct for this cheese and distinguishes it from the bare sticky orange of a Limburger. Traditional wheels are ripened on spruce boards, which seed their own flora.
8. It is ready when the whole wheel gives evenly under a thumb. A Reblochon is meant to be supple all the way through rather than runny at the edge.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t 🔴 UNTESTED. 🔴 This is not Reblochon de Savoie AOP, which is raw-milk, farm-made in a defined Alpine area, and legally cannot be what comes out of a Michigan basement.

🔴 The 60-day rule, and a cheese caught by it US federal rule requires raw-milk cheese to be aged at least 60 days at 35 F or above before sale. Reblochon ripens in six to eight weeks — call it 42 to 56 days — so the authentic cheese is not legally importable or saleable in the United States. ⭐ It is a clean example of a rule written for one hazard reshaping a cheese it was never aimed at, and the full argument is at /cheese/history/raw-milk-wars/.

🔴 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.

⭐ The fat gradient through a milking is real Milk drawn at the end of a milking carries markedly more fat than milk drawn at the start — the fat globules are held back in the udder and come out last. That is standard dairy practice knowledge, and it is what turns the reblocher story from an anecdote into a mechanism: the farmers were not merely hiding milk, they were keeping the best of it.

What it is for Tartiflette — potatoes, bacon, onion and a whole Reblochon melted over the top — is a 20th-century dish and, by most accounts, one promoted to sell cheese. ⚠ It is delicious and it is not ancient, and I would rather say so than let it stand as folk tradition.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/washed-rind/ and /cheese/history/raw-milk-wars/ on the site.