Carre de l'Est

Carre de l'Est is a French cheese originating from the Lorraine region of eastern France. Its name translates literally as Square of the East, a reference both to its shape — a square slab — and to its place of origin in the east of the country. No specific inventor or founding year is documented on the Wikipedia page, and the cheese does not hold an Appellation designation. It is a regional specialty, traditionally made from cow's milk and matured for roughly five weeks.

A square of Carre de l'Est yields under the knife to a soft, pale paste beneath a downy white bloomy rind. The texture is creamy and supple, somewhere between Camembert and a firmer Brie; the flavor is milky and gentle, with a characteristic faintly smoky, bacon-like note that distinguishes it from its closest relatives. Eaten at room temperature as a table cheese.

Carre de l'Est is a soft bloomy-rind cheese. Rennet coagulates cow's milk; the curd is ladled into square molds, drained, salted, and inoculated on the surface with a white mold — a Penicillium species, typically Penicillium camemberti. The mold grows across the surface during affinage, forming the downy white rind; it secretes enzymes that break down the paste from the outside in through proteolysis, softening the interior progressively to the creamy texture characteristic of bloomy-rind cheeses. The roughly five-week affinage is short, keeping the flavor mild; the characteristic smoky note develops during this surface ripening.