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Cheese from Würchwitz, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany

Milbenkäse (mite cheese)Milbenkäse

Quark flavoured with salt and caraway is shaped, dried and laid in crates with live cheese mites and rye flour. The mites ripen the cheese over several months, and it is eaten with the mites. Their defence secretion gives it a lemon-like note.

A short entry: the sources we found record only what is said here about Milbenkäse itself.

Short entryCheese

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedNo recipe amounts are published.
Skim-milk quark
Salt and caraway
Live cheese mites (Tyrolichus casei)[melnyk2010][shimano2022]
Rye flourFed to the mites so that some cheese is left
Startermites (Tyrolichus casei) living in the ripening crates
Start
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What changes: Skim-milk quark is mixed with salt and caraway and shaped into small balls or sticks

Step 1 of 3
Season the quark and shape it
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented

Well-drained skim-milk quark, dried for a few days, is mixed with salt and caraway, then shaped into sticks or palm-sized balls. Output: palm-sized balls or sticks of quark.

Flavour
caraway
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

Quark flavoured with salt and caraway is shaped, dried and laid in crates with live cheese mites and rye flour. The mites ripen the cheese over several months, and it is eaten with the mites. Their defence secretion gives it a lemon-like note. Cheese mite Tyrolichus casei does most of the fermenting.

What makes this one different

Milbenkäse is ripened by enzymes from cheese mites, where almost all other cheeses ripen by rennet enzymes or lactic bacteria. Their defence secretion carries neral, the lemon note of the cheese. Mimolette's mites work its rind.

Milk
Skim-milk quark
Ripening
Several months with live mites (TU Darmstadt)
Flavour source
Neral, a lemon-oil compound in the mites' secretion; absent once the mites are removed

Related ferments

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

German Wikipedia says cheese mites have been bred around Zeitz and Altenburg since the Middle Ages, and that by about 1970 only one elderly woman in Würchwitz still made the cheese. In 1881 the physician Friedrich Küchenmeister wrote that farmers in some parts of Germany bred mites in boxes to make it. The teacher Helmut Pöschel began breeding mites and revived the tradition, and Würchwitz put up a monument to the cheese mite in 2001.

  1. [melnyk2010] Melnyk J.P., Smith A., Scott-Dupree C., Marcone M.F., Hill A. 2010, Identification of cheese mite species inoculated on Mimolette and Milbenkase cheese through cryogenic scanning electron microscopy, Journal of Dairy Science 93:3461–3468, doi:10.3168/jds.2009-2937paper
  2. [shimano2022] Shimano S., Hiruta S.F., Shimizu N., Hagino W., Aoki J.I., OConnor B.M. 2022, Do 'cheese factory-specific' mites (Acari, Astigmata) exist in the cheese-ripening cabinet?, Experimental and Applied Acarology 87:49–65, doi:10.1007/s10493-022-00725-8paper
  3. [bruckner2016] Brückner A., Heethoff M. 2016, Scent of a mite, origin and chemical characterization of the lemon-like flavor of mite-ripened cheeses, Experimental and Applied Acarology 69:249–261, doi:10.1007/s10493-016-0040-7paper
  4. [wikipedia-de] Wikipedia (German), Würchwitzer Milbenkäseweb
  5. [tud2016] TU Darmstadt, press release 26 April 2016, Ökologen der TU Darmstadt entlocken Milbenkäse das Aroma-Geheimnisweb