Cheese has a different process for making it each time. The first division is pasteurized / unpasteurized. This is whether or not you cook the milk first to rid it of any bacteria such as listeria (though evidence that milk has listeria in it in the first place is very far and few between). This changes the consistency of the cheese on a small scale. An uncooked cheese will be a lot 'smoother' and curdy. You get much more of a creamy taste with unpasteurized.
Next, you put the renet into the milk to make it solidify. You could put in a lot, or you could put in a little. The more you put in, the more the curds (cream, milk solids) separate from whey (liquids, sugars). The renet acts to break down simple proteins to separate the milk. As it solidifies, the whey is drained off for use in growing corn/wheat and so on. The more fat inside the cheese, the softer it'll be. Alpine cheese and gouda (emental, old Amsterdam etc. usually has less fat than softer cheeses).
You can then add the blue spores if you want your cheese to be blue. They do this for some cheddars, too, even though the cheddars aren't meant to be blue. on that later. Salt is also added. This is where a lot of flavor comes in.
Then the curds are cut up either large or small. Larger curds sometimes mean that the cheese is less dense. Some cheeses press the curds together using a piston or screw. This is called 'cheddaring' and it's where cheddar cheese comes from. When the curds are cut, they are cut with a comb-like rake. At this stage, they are wobbly like jelly cubes.
Then they're put into the molds with holes in it. At this point, the cheese tastes like solid milk, or curds. Maybe a bit like cream, but not as rich.
Then the whey is drained off over a period of days (or pressed out, if it's cheddar). Softer cheeses are often just left to their own accord, so that the gaps between the curds remain in the cheese. If you've added blue spores, they will start to grow inside these air gaps, where they are exposed to oxygen, converting the complex sugars in the cheese into basic sugars you can taste. If your cheese is compressed to get rid of these gaps, the blue won't grow (unless you get a crack in the cheese as it matures, as you often will with cheddar).
The outside of the cheeses are smoothed to stop anything getting in that shouldn't be in, and the cheese is given a covering skin - white mold (Roquefort), wax (Wensleydale), yeast (Stilton), a wash (Stinking Bishop) or cloth (Westcombe cheddar).
Then the cheese is put away for maturing. As a cheese matures, the remaining whey in the cheese evaporates, so much so that the average cheese loses 10% of its weight in evaporation every year. As it ages, cheese tends to get dryer and more solid for this reason, and also sweeter as the bacteria work on it. If you want a soft cheese, it'll take less time to mature. Some cheeses, like the Indian paneer are ready straight from the cloth with a drainage time of 15-25 minutes.
As the cheese matures, the bacteria inside the cheese (as well as any that were in the milk) get to work on anaerobic respiration, turning the complicated sugars and tastes locked away in the cheese into palatable tastes we can sense. There are also other aspects - cave molds, cheese mites and 'sweating' - where the skin is encouraged to 'sweat', leaking the whey from inside onto the outside of the skin where it stays and encourages flavor-making bacteria. Don't worry, though - these bacteria aren't harmful - and in fact act to protect the cheese from harmful bacteria that might want to grow by taking their food source.
The cheese is turned all through maturing to give it an even amount of gravity, otherwise you find it 'sinks' to be bottom heavy. This is why cheeses are often coin-shaped (with two faces). Parmesan is one of the heaviest cheeses. These are turned by - no shit here - a cheese turning robot.
There are also other cheeses, like Adrahan and Stinking bishop, which have their skins 'washed' with brine or alcohol to make it extra sticky just before maturing. This goes into the cheese from the outside, flavoring it on the way through.
it tastes different because the cows never go out to grass. instead they are fed on silage which in itself smell awful and this awful smell calculates into awful cheese.
ReplyDeleteits has to be this way to get the retail selling price low because people buy on price.
the absolute best cheese must be made from unpasteurised full cream milk from grass fed cows. any other cheese is in my opinion mass market fancy named inferior cheese.