Cheese, Tulum-Style

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

The Anatolian cheese that is named after its bag. Tulum means the container, and the cheese is whatever ripens inside it.

⭐ It is not alone in that: burduf in Romania, touloumotyri in Greece and guda in Georgia are four languages naming a cheese after the sack, which is one of the more striking things the world tour turned up.

🔴 And a correction, because the popular description is wrong. You will read that tulum is aged “in a whole goatskin.” The sources I could find describe kidskin, or, increasingly and unremarkably, cloth sacks — and this collection corrected itself on that point rather than leaving the more picturesque version standing.

⚠ Which is convenient, because a cloth sack is what you are going to use.

Ingredients

• 3 gallons whole sheep’s or goat’s milk (not ultra-pasteurised)
• 1/2 tsp mesophilic culture — see Cheese Culture, Mesophilic Mother
• 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
• About 3 oz coarse salt — roughly 3% of the drained curd weight
• A close-woven cloth sack, or a large piece of linen and twine

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. Warm the milk to 88-90 F / 31-32 C, add the culture, ripen 45 minutes.
2. Rennet at a flocculation multiplier of 3, and set firm.
3. Cut to 1/2 inch and stir 20-30 minutes at the set temperature. No cook.
4. Drain hard, in cloth, for several hours until the curd is genuinely firm and dry to the hand.
5. 🔴 Break the curd up small and work the salt through it thoroughly. Roughly 3% of the drained weight. ⚠ This is a salted-curd cheese, not a brined one — the salt has to be even, because nothing after this point will redistribute it.
6. Pack it into the sack, hard, forcing out every air pocket. ⭐ The packing is the technique. Air left in the sack is where mould grows; a well-packed tulum ripens as a single dense mass with no interior surfaces at all.
7. Tie it off and hang it to ripen at 50-55 F / 10-13 C for 3 to 6 months. Some weeping is normal in the first fortnight.
8. What right looks like: dense, crumbly-but-oily, sharp and quite salty, with no rind and no eyes — the paste should be uniform right through, because the whole point of the sack was that there is no inside and outside.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it is not 🔴 UNTESTED, and this is a cloth-sack version of a cheese traditionally ripened in a prepared skin. That is a real difference, not a cosmetic one — a skin breathes and contributes its own flora, and a cloth sack in a domestic cave does not do the same thing.

🔴 The correction, and why it matters more than it looks The romantic version — a whole goatskin — is repeated everywhere. What the sources actually describe is kidskin or cloth. ⭐ This collection had printed the goatskin version and corrected it in public rather than editing it away, because the habit of quietly fixing your own errors is how a collection ends up unable to tell you which parts it has checked.

⭐ Four languages, one idea Tulum (Turkish) · burduf (Romanian) · touloumotyri (Greek) · guda (Georgian) all name the cheese after the bag it ripens in. ⚠ And guda is sheepskin — the clay pots belong to dambalkhacho, a different Georgian cheese this collection once conflated with it and has since separated.

⭐ What actually makes this cheese is not in the milk This is the thread running through the uncommon cheeses: the identity comes from a plant or a container, not from the dairy. A thistle’s stamens, a Sahel milkweed, a kidskin bag, a tube of fir bark, a carved spruce mould, an oven. ⭐ The world tour notes that the vessel is an ingredient on every inhabited continent, and lists four plant coagulants separately — they are the same observation. In each case somebody had milk and solved the rest with whatever was to hand, and the solution became the cheese.

Read alongside Greece and Turkey and the ones nobody here has heard of.