Skip to main content
Support

Browse by category

All categories
Home

Cheese from Shintoku, Tokachi, Hokkaido, Japan

Sakura cheese (Kyodo Gakusha Shintoku Farm)さくら

Sakura is a soft fresh cheese from a Hokkaido farm, served with salted cherry blossom and leaf. The farm adds lactic bacteria plus two yeasts, one from sake and one isolated from local wild cherries, and usually ripens it for 10 days.

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

Short entryCheese10 days

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedWhat goes in. No source gives amounts for this ferment.
cow milk
Starterlactic acid bacteria, sake yeast and Tokachi-no yeast

Total time across the recorded steps: 10 days

Start
Drag the bar or press Play
shapes, not to countLactic acid bacteriaMilk sugarLactic acid

What changes: Soft cheese curd is made from the farm's milk

Step 1 of 4
Make a soft cheese
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
Lactic acid bacteria
Yeasts

Output: soft cheese.

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

lactic bacteria sour the milk

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

Sakura is a soft fresh cheese from a Hokkaido farm, served with salted cherry blossom and leaf. The farm adds lactic bacteria plus two yeasts, one from sake and one isolated from local wild cherries, and usually ripens it for 10 days. Made in 4 steps over 10 days. The longest step, ripen, takes 10 days (Ministry of Agriculture 2022). Lactic acid bacteria and Yeast from sake brewing do most of the fermenting.

Key numbers
Main step10 daysReported[maff-aff-2022]Ripen

What makes this one different

Sakura adds two yeasts to the usual lactic bacteria, one from sake and one isolated from local Ezo mountain cherries, and is served with salted cherry blossom and leaf. An English outline instead describes it as a Camembert-style cheese washed in sake, dusted with Dutch myrtle and wrapped in bamboo leaf.

Related ferments

Variants

  • Sakura no affinéRipened at least 2 weeks longer than the usual 10 days; mellow, with more umami.
  • Camembert-style, sake-washed version (outline only)Washed in local sake (Yachi Yanagi), dusted with Dutch myrtle and wrapped in bamboo leaf, as described on Wikipedia.

History and sources

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

Wikipedia says Kyodo Gakusha Shintoku Farm was founded by Shinichiro Miyajima in 1974, and that Sakura won gold in the soft cheese class at the Mountain Cheese Olympics in Appenzell, Switzerland (its source is a news report of October 2004).

  1. [maff-aff-2022] Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan 2022, aff magazine June 2022, 自然と風土が生み出す日本各地のご当地チーズ (Sakura, Kyodo Gakusha Shintoku Farm)gov
  2. [wp] Wikipedia, Sakura cheese (outline only)wiki
  3. [airmail2024] Airmail, The big cheese, 2024-04-06other
  4. [fortune-japanese] Fortune, Japanese cheese artisan Tokachi raclette collectiveother