Episode 39.
How Are Different Cheeses Made? (Part 3)

Question:

Key Points:

• We did an overview of Last Week's episode and the episode from two weeks ago
• In ancient times, it was common to carry liquids in the stomachs of slaughteres animals. The assumption of how cheese was fisrt invented is that a sheep's stomach was used to carry milk. When they tried to drink the milk, it had turned into curds and whey.
• Step Four: Drain the Whey
  • There are some cheeses which are "whey cheeses" which are made from the drained whey and not from the curds. The most common of these is Ricotta.
  • If you don't drain the whey, then you have cottage cheese
• Step Five: Prepare the Curds
  • Malachi called this step "Make it your own", which is pretty accurate because this is where a large amount of the nuanced variations come in to differnt types of cheeses
  • Most cheeses have salt added in some way: either directly to the curds, after the curds are shaped, or primarily by heating it in a salt-water brine
  • Most cheeses have the curds heated in some way. Those that are can be heavily heated, only heated a little bit, or even not heated directly. Mozerrella is heated by pouring hot water over the curds rather than heating it directly; this is part of the reason for its stringyness
  • This is also where other things can be added in to flavored cheses
• Step Six: Shape and Mold
  • The shape can make some difference in the cheese taste but not a lot
  • The Mold which is used makes a big difference in the taste of the cheese, even though it usually does not permeate the cheese rind
  • Blue Cheese is made with Peniccilliam Roccaforte and the rind must be pierced (i.e. make a hole in it) in order to get the mold to grow throughout the whole cheese
  • A "washed cheese" is aged and then has the mold periodically washed off of the cheese through the aging process
• Step Seven: Age
• Fresh cheeses are not aged but are eaten "fresh" (i.e. right away). Usually, they also do not have mold applied to the outside. e.g. Cream Cheese
• As the cheese ages, the cheese becomes more flavorful or "sharper"
• The cheese also gets harder as it ages because the water in the cheese is being extracted
• The super hard cheeses come from being aged for a long time
• The cheese-hardening process can create "cheese crystals" when there is so much water extracted from a hard cheese that it forms a crystaline structure in the cheese