Episode 37.
How Are Different Cheeses Made? (Part 1)
Question:
How are different Cheeses Made?
Key Points:
- We did an overview of Last Week's episode
- WARNING: You may not want to know how the sausage is made
- WARNING: Cheese is in this boat; you may get grossed out and not want to eat cheese again
- Eating just the cheese curds, which have not been made into cheese yet, makes your teeth squeek
- Main Steps to make cheese
- Prepare the milk
- Add a Lactic Acid Bacteria
- Add a Curdling Agent
- There are different types of curdling agents
- The most common curdling agent is animal rennet, which is an enzyme extracted from a sheep's stomach
- This ends up creating Curds and Whey (which is sometimes called Cottage Cheese)
- Drain the Whey
- Make it Your Own
- This is where a lot of differences are in making different types of cheese
- The standard things to do are to salt the curds and heat them up so that they can be formed into a shape (which is the next step
- This is also the step where most flavored cheeses have things added to them
- Shape and Mold
- Cheeses are traditionally made into "wheels", but they can be pressed into whatever shape is desired
- The shape ends up somewhat contributing to the taste of the cheese
- "Molding" does not mean putting it in a mold. It means applying mold to the outside of the cheese (like bread mold, but a different type of mold)
- Aging
( 8. And then Eating )