Cheese folk speak of the bloomy rind or soft-ripened cheese. Friends at a cocktail party fall back on the old familiar “Brie.” What binds these cheeses together is their downy, edible white rind. In cheese techni-speak, it’s called a bloomy rind (or sometimes a soft-ripened, or even a surface-ripened cheese). Brie-ish cheeses have a rind made of some combination of mold (Penicillium candidum, Penicillium camemberti) or mold and yeast or yeast-like fungus (Geotrichum candidum) that blooms like tiny flowers on the exterior of a ripening cheese. Over time, these patches of yellowish white fur are patted down to form a cohesive skin, or rind, on the cheese’s surface. This live rind breaks down the fats and proteins of a cheese, causing an increasingly creamy to runny texture over time. This is why you may encounter that glistening layer just under the rind that I call the “creamline.” The moister a cheese is to begin with, the faster this breakdown occurs.
Traditionally, as in northern France in the Middle Ages, these molds were ambient in cellars where cheese was stored. These days, cheeses are inoculated, meaning the mold/yeasts are introduced in powder form to milk during the cheesemaking process. They may also be added to the curd after coagulation, or be misted onto the surface of finished and formed cheeses prior to aging.
This being said, bloomy rind cheeses can be made in any country of any milk. What I’ve said before about other types of cheese (and will say again and again because it’s what makes cheese so neat) is that within this one style there is a considerable spectrum of flavor and intensity. You may like one end of the spectrum and hate the other. Even more vexingly for the cheese newbie, both ends of the spectrum are occupied by cheese called “Brie.” Therefore, I find it easiest to say what bloomy rinds should be by defining what they should not be.
To taste across this vast and miraculous spectrum start with double-crème French Brie. Cream-enriched to hit 60+% butterfat avoid those packed in an individual wood box. (Those hockey pucks are generally the most industrially produced, with thick, tough rinds and aspriny aspirations.) Basic Bries are placid and unoffensive, buttery, with a hint of sautéed white button mushroom.
From there, consider Fromager d’Affinois. Made with the aid ultrafiltration, the milk going into this cheese has had its solids filtered out from its water prior to cheesemaking. There is a bit more protein and calcium than in a cheese where the curds are drained during the make process. Why care? One winds up with an almost otherworldly smearability and a hallmark rind that’s thin and totally innocuous in flavor. The cheese is actually quite tart, more like cultured butter, though it does qualify as a double-creme with 60% butterfat.
Add cream, add butterfat, hit 75%+ and you’ve got yourself a triple-crème. The most famous are French, as in St. Andre, Pierre Robert or Brillat Savarin and at their best should be a confidently salted mouthful of room temperature buttercream. Some American stalwarts such as Cowgirl Creamery with their Mt. Tam admirably manage the balance of decadence and backbone.
In the vein of bloomy-need-not-be-French-cow, the pioneering American cheese Humboldt Fog by Cypress Grove Chevre is a brilliant example of the flavor difference the milk makes. Humboldt Fog isn't sticky and silky like Brie, but you look at it and are reminded of Alice in Wonderland Brie that was hit with a growth potion. Its flavor is saltier and less acidic than fresh “chevre”, with a notable absence of animal notes. Instead, you get a flaky cheesecake texture and buttermilk tang with pronounced citrus fruit. P.S. That dark line through the middle isn’t blue mold but decorative, edible vegetable ash.
While these last few have increasingly pronounced tang, the culmination of bloomy potential are those cheeses that best approximate the raw milk, illegal-in- the –U.S. Brie de Meaux. Most bloomy rinds found here will be pasteurized as they are aged for less than sixty days. That said there are some that approach the extreme that smells like very slowly, lovingly, overcooked broccoli. A cheese that tastes savory, the finished swallow of broccoli cheese soup, but mainly of fat and sweet cream. Garlicky, with rich, condensed flavor; on the exhalation a pleasantly moldy, damp hay-y whiff. Ferme de Jouvence Brie Fermier, Rouzaire’s Formage de Meaux or Le Chatelain Brie are among the most promising.