Remember Joey and Scott, the cute little kids in that cheesy old commercial…I mean, that old cheese commercial?
In the remake, they should cast me, because I’ve always loved cheese.
For good reason: it’s one of the most nutritious foods ever created. Just 100 grams of Cheddar supplies 36 percent of the protein, 80 percent of the calcium, and 34 percent of the fat in the recommended daily allowance, plus vitamins, essential amino acids and calcium, phosphorus and other minerals. (Of course, it also supplies lots of calories, which can be a problem if you like it as much as I do.)
Cheese is what you get when you coagulate milk with rennet (a digestive enzyme from a calf’s stomach), then drain off the remaining liquid (called whey). Milk from cows is most commonly used, although some common cheeses are also made from sheep’s milk (Roquefort) and goat’s milk (Chevre). It’s possible to make cheese out of the milk from any mammal, including buffalo, reindeer, horses and yaks.
The first cheese was probably a happy accident brought about by the practice of carrying milk in pouches made from animal stomachs. The bacteria in the milk and the digestive juices from the stomach would have worked together to form a crude cheese.
If that’s how it happened, it happened a long time ago, because cheese making artifacts dating from as far back as 2000 B.C. have been found. Later, the Romans developed a large cheese industry, and still later, cheese making became a specialty of monasteries, many of which developed their own secret recipes which persist today as various popular European cheeses.
Cheeses differ from one another primarily in the amount of moisture they contain, which is controlled by the cutting and draining of the coagulated milk (called “curd”), the types of microorganisms added to the cheese and encouraged to grow (molds, bacteria, etc.), the temperatures and levels of acidity used during the making of the cheese, and how long the cheese is left to ripen, and under what conditions. The percentage of fat in the original milk is also important: the more fat in the cheese, the smoother and tastier it is. Low-fat cheeses tend to be tough and relatively flavorless.
All these variations produce a wide range of cheeses, from the very hard (Parmesan) to the semi soft (Muenster); from Gorgonzola, ripened and flavored by mold that grows inside the cheese, to Camembert, ripened by mold that grows on the outside of the cheese, to the extremely fragrant Limburger, ripened by surface bacteria, to the completely unripened cottage cheese and ricotta, which are basically just drained, pressed curd. Some cheeses also contain herbs, seeds and even alcoholic beverages, and many are colored with vegetable dyes.
Cheddar is probably the cheese most commonly eaten in North America. To make it, milk is first pasteurized, heated to about 70 degrees Celsius to kill dangerous bacteria. Then it’s cooled to about 30 degrees and pumped into the cheese vat, a closed cylinder, where it’s mixed with the starter, a culture of various micro-organisms that ferment the sugar in the milk into lactic acid — in other words, sour the milk.
It has to be sour so the rennet can do its work. This brown liquid is so powerful that you only need one millilitre of it to coagulate five litres of milk, a process that takes about 30 minutes. Then the clotted milk is cut into tiny cubes, and a short time after that the temperature is raised slowly to about 40 degrees. This makes the curd solid enough to be formed into slabs, salted, drained and pressed to remove some of the whey. Then the slabs are placed in cloth-lined metal containers and pressed to form blocks weighing about 18 kilograms. The blocks are either dipped in wax or wrapped in plastic film and left to cure at temperatures of about 10 degrees. Mild Cheddar might only be cured for three months, but it takes a year or more to make a strong Cheddar.
Processed cheese is a mixture of ground cheese, salts, other ingredients such as milk powder, whey powder, coloring and flavoring, and often vegetable gum (which produces a chewy texture). Steam is blown into the mixture to raise the temperature to 80 degrees, which turns it soft and pliable, so it can be shaped into nice thin slices or whatever else is desired.
Whether it’s Cheddar, Colby, Swiss or Velveeta, I like cheese, which is why I’m all set to be the new Scott or Joey in a remake of the old commercial. Watch this:
“Cheese, please!”
Isn’t that cute?
