When "cat hair" meets cheese

At MonS we receive a goat and cow milk cheese called Petit St. Hannois.  It usually comes nicely dried, a light yellow 2 x 2 inch cylinder-shaped morsel of goodness.  Recently, however, we received a batch that was larger and lighter in color because it was younger and contained more moisture.  It turns out the cheeses were brought to us after just three days in their cool drying room when we usually receive them after five or six days.

As usual, we put the Petits St. Hannois in our frigo.  Well wouldn't you know it, in a few days, our cheeses looked like balls of beige fluff!  In the frigo, the Petits St. Hannois quickly started growing mucor, or mucoromycotina, a mould that looks like cat hair (in French we'll often call this mould just that: poil de chat).  This particular strain of mucor sprouts rapidly into thin strands, making the cheese look fuzzy and beige-brown.

Mucor Source: http://fr.academic.ru/dic.nsf/frwiki/1197386

It's not that the cheeses would taste bad with the mucor, it's that they didn't look very appealing; patting down the mould just made the cheeses look dirty.  And while tasting a cheese can improve the chances of a customer purchasing an "ugly" cheese, at MonS we try to keep all our products in delicious and beautiful shape.  So our next move: put the cheeses in the haloir.

We decided to go for the haloir because if we could get the Petits St. Hannois to grow the delicate yeast, geotricum, we might be able to salvage the batch.  The haloir is ideal for geotricum because this yeast needs a dry and warm environment with a high level of acidity/low pH.  The haloir helps remove the excess moisture from the cheeses and increases acidity.

In the haloir, our sorry batch of Petits St. Hannois started rapidly growing geotricum, white and blue strains of penicillium (mould), as well as a number of other multi-colored moulds.  This was exacly what we had hoped for.  Geotricum is a hospitable environment for all the moulds floating around the caves - and apparently in the haloir!  We could tell the yeast was growing because it formed a very light beige "skin" over the cheese that would protect it from the mucor.  So instead of conserving a smooth, clean and young-looking cheese, we have started a new Petit St. Hannois affinage.  One that has geotricum as its protective base coat, followed by strains of penicillium that will gradually coat the entire cheese until it looks thinly cushioned, white and blue.  This yeast-mould combination is one that we use for most of the cheeses in the goat cheese Cave # 2.