Who said that Camembert necessarily had to be immaculate white?
Until the 1950s, these raw milk cheeses could display gray or green mold.
But these mushrooms, necessary for fermentation and giving products their taste and consistency, must not have been sufficiently appetizing.
The industry therefore preferred an all-white specimen and the albino strain of the so-called
Penicillium camemberti
established itself among all producers.
Problem: the intensive cloning of this single individual resulted in an inability to reproduce and provide large quantities of the spores necessary for the inoculation of Camembert.
So much so that the Journal du CNRS warned last month of the possible extinction of Norman cheese.
At Le Parisien, the laboratory at Paris-Saclay University specifies that these fears also affect bries, such as those from Meaux, Melun or Coulommiers, which use the same mushroom.
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