A Young Cheese with History

Real cheese lovers do it on the roof in the hot Mediterranean sun. Making kamakh rijal the very old way. By Charles Perry

By Charles Perry | Tuesday, 08 September 2009 | 11:45

Fresh kamakh rijal with pita bread. Photo credit: Charles Perry

When you think cheese, you think waxed wheels of Cheddar, mellowing in cool underground vaults. Not a tub of milk open to the sky on a rooftop broiling in the Mediterranean sun.

But there is one kind of cheese that’s made that way. Or used to be – people stopped doing it about 600 years go.

They were fools. The recipe still works just fine. Smells a lot like Cheddar, actually, though its consistency is more like vanilla pudding; it's a cheese spread, not a slicing cheese.

It's called kamakh rijal, rijal being a Persian word meaning "something that is eaten by licking." There are recipes for it in all the medieval Arabic cookbooks, including the 10th-century "Book of Dishes" and the 14th-century "Flower of the Garden."

The recipes say to age it on your rooftop from June to October, but it doesn't really need the outdoor location or summer heat—I've made it in a garage and in an air-conditioned breakfast nook, where it was quite the conversation piece. I sort of suspect its medieval popularity had to do with a shortage of cool cellars for ageing cheese in the Middle East.

At any rate, it needs no special equipment, just a mixing bowl and a spoon. All you need to do is stir it once a day and add more milk from time to time to make up for evaporation.

As with any cheese, you have to wait a several weeks. It starts smelling cheesy after three weeks, and then really, really cheesy around week six (that got to be one of the conversation subjects in my breakfast nook, I must report), and you can actually use it as a bread spread by then. The medieval recipes call for 14 to 16 weeks of ageing though, and the flavor becomes richer and less sharp and salty if you wait.

Here's how you make it. You mix 1 part yogurt with 1 part salt and 5 parts milk. Apart from the daily stirring and occasional topping up with more milk, that's all the work involved.

How does this work? The cheese flavor is produced by bacteria which are indigenous to milk. The reason that milk doesn’t automatically turn into cheese is that these are slow-growing bacteria. Ordinarily, more aggressive bugs will have spoiled the milk before they have a chance to do their thing.

That's why cheese-making generally starts with curdling the milk and pressing out the whey. With most of the water gone, the good bacteria are the only ones that can live in the cheese.

Kamakh rijal takes another approach. The salt and the yogurt's lactic acid create a hostile environment for most bacteria. Again, the slow-growing cheese bacteria can survive. (After 16 weeks, when the kamakh rijal is ready, I suppose the salt and acidity still protect it and you could go on leaving it out, but I'd stick it in the refrigerator anyway.)

Most recipes say to add flavorings beginning at week 12. A typical recipe would call for garlic and mint. But the recipe books mention many more flavorings you can use. You could add onion or thyme, just as in European spreadable cheeses such as Boursin. You could add caraway, which is common in German cheese.

But the Middle Ages were crazy about spices, so you could also add cinnamon (I’ve tried it; not bad), cloves (I wouldn’t want to overdo that one) or mixed spices.

Or rose petals … making, yes, a rose-flavored cheese spread. If you have a problem with rosewater-flavored baklava, I'm afraid, you'll really have a problem with rose-flavored cheese. (Tough guys like me, who are more macho about eating roses, will have no problem with it.)

Lickable rose cheese! Wait till chefs get hold of that. It's so ancienne, it's practically nouvelle.

Kamakh Rijal

Ingredients
1 cup plain, unflavored sour yogurt, containing live cultures
1 cup salt
5 cups milk
Milk as needed to replace evaporation
Final flavoring: 3 crushed cloves garlic, 4 sprigs mint, or other herbs or spices as desired and to taste

Directions

Mix the yogurt, salt and milk and in a 2-quart mixing bowl or stainless steel saucepan (one you can spare for many months).
Stir well daily. Add milk as needed to keep the volume constant.
After six to eight weeks, add flavorings.

Serve as spread for bread after 14 to 16 weeks.

Note: This recipe is for the entertainment of consenting adults only. I can’t guarantee that it will always produce a safe result, but the batches I’ve made were fine and the fact that the recipe was widespread in the Middle Ages suggests it is safe.

Is there a rind?

In the photo, this intriguing cheese appears to have some sort of rind. Did you finish the aging in smaller containers? Or is it just a trick of the photo?

judy dugan , September 14, 2009

Last Updated on Monday, 14 September 2009 17:24