If you’re anything like us, when you’re not eating cheese, you're daydreaming about cheese. Swiss! Gouda! Provolone! Cheddar! The deliciousness is REAL. But the world of cheese isn't all just cheddar bacon fries and buffalo chicken nachos. There's some pretty cool stuff going on behind the scenes that makes cheese so darn delicious. Here’s an inside look at how cheese is made, plus the scoop on rBGH and rBST. Fair warning though, this post may make you very, very hungry.
Watch our video to learn the steps around how cheese is made, or read about it below.
Cheese is made with just four ingredients — milk, salt, culture, and rennet (the coagulant that holds the rest of the ingredients together). You can manipulate these 4 ingredients so many ways to affect flavor, smell, and texture. It’s amazing. Simple right? Yeah, not so much. Let’s dig a little deeper.
Milk consists of water, lactose, fat, minerals, and proteins, but the exact composition can vary depending on the animal it’s from. Once we’ve got exactly the right kind of milk locked down, it gets pasteurized. This is just a fancy word for heating the milk which removes microorganisms and makes milk safe for consumption.
Now it’s time for the living cultures to get to work! One of those living cultures is called starter culture. We use it early in cheesemaking to rapidly acidify milk, help with coagulation, and prevent spoilage. From here, the cheese starts developing aroma, texture, and flavor as it matures.
Rennet coagulates the milk and helps separate the curds & whey. It acts on milk proteins to form solid curd mass, usually in just 30 to 60 minutes! There are three types of rennet, animal, vegetable, and microbial. Most of Dietz & Watson cheeses fall into the vegetable and microbial categories.
After the cultures and rennet have done their jobs separating and coagulating the milk fat and proteins, the cheese is cut to extract as much whey as possible. Then, the remaining curds are washed, drained, stirred and packed into molds to develop their firmness.
Salt! What a magical ingredient. It enhances flavor, controls moisture and pH, and aids in rind formation. After salting, the cheese is pressed for hours, and up to days, to develop its texture. Some cheese is then aged for months or even years. If you’re looking for some great aged varieties, try our Originals Grana Padano or Originals Pecorino Romano.
The next step depends on what cheese we are crafting. If it's one of our flavored varieties, we heat the cheese and melt it down so it's molten hot, then add in the ingredients that give it its signature flavor. For instance, we add horseradish when making our tasty Horseradish Cheddar and a whole lot of spicy peppers when making our hot Jalapeño & Cayenne Cheddar.
Long story short, rBST and rBGH are synthetic hormones that mimic the ones which already exist naturally within cows. They increase the cows’ milk production. Dietz & Watson works with dairy farmers that pledge to not use this ingredient. To start, try our rBGH free Aged Gouda, Goat Cheese or Brie!
There’s a lot that goes into making cheese. It’s pretty crazy how just milk, salt, culture, and rennet can come together to form so many different flavors and textures! Now that you’re a cheese pro, the only thing left to do is go sample all the varieties. Find Dietz & Watson near you with our product locator or check out Amazon Fresh for safe delivery.
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