Un-BRIE-Lievable! French Scientists Have Discovered a New Cheese-Ripening Trick

Um, did someone say “sacré bleu cheese”? Well I just typed it, baby, and I'm not sorry—because some crazy shit’s really going down in France!

France is home to a whole taxonomy of cheeses that can be uniquely pungent and, uh, also very good. We’re talking Camembert, Comté, Livarot, Roquefort. The works.

But the ripening process for these cheeses is traditionally quite long, ranging from weeks to years—practically interminable. A team at France's National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) has figured out a workaround, the Telegraph reported on Friday, and cheese traditionalists are pretty “feta up” about it! (Haha! Zing! Please kill me! Feta's Greek, I know!)

Last week, the team at INRA unveiled a technology called 'From'Innov' (a portmanteau of fromage and innovation) that'd expedite the ripening processes for various cheeses. The results, the researchers claim, would maintain the pungency and taste of cheeses at a lower cost that’s easier to produce and, ultimately, sell to international markets where demand for cheese is extraordinarily high.

Production involves running two parallel processes—production of the actual cheese plus creating its smell—in two separate silos and combining the products from each one. There's also potential for scientists to add various probiotic mix-ins at this later stage.

The team, led by Romain Jeantet, has reportedly demoed the technique at INRA's 10th annual Cheese Symposium, which began on Sunday, in Rennes, France. “With the same material, we can thus make a cream cheese on Monday, a Camembert on Tuesday and a hard cheese on Wednesday,” one of the researchers, Gilles Garric, told the Independent. Incroyable! Garric also claimed to the Telegraph that the INRA was "in talks with three dairy giants." Nether Jeantet nor Garric responded to immediate request for further comment from MUNCHIES on Monday.

But recreating a natural process within the confines of a laboratory compromises the very integrity of cheese production, critics claim, hastening an historically drawn-out but pure aging process. To critics, this is the precise problem with From'Innov—it’s intrusive, practically a bastardization of cheesemaking. “This is yet another step towards creating dead food rather than letting nature run its course,” one detractor, Véronique Richez-Lerouge of "traditional cheese defense group" Association Fromages de Terroirs, told the Independent. “Cheese is alive and needs to be ripened and matured over a long period, preferably with live rare milk.”

Richez-Lerouge, who did not respond to immediate request for further comment from MUNCHIES on Monday, maintained that it’s foolish to try and simulate this process within a lab. What’s next, she feared—banana or raspberry aroma-infused cheeses?

Another naysayer, a chef named Arnaud Daguin, bemoaned the lack of “transcendence” that’d result from such lab-produced Frankencheeses. “There is no point trying to play God and outdo the natural world when we haven’t even understood a tenth of its potential.” Daguin could not be reached for comment from MUNCHIES on Monday.

Here’s where I believe we can agree: I don’t know anyone who wants banana-scented cheese. That’d be… a swing and a Swiss!