14.3 Cheese: kinds and how it is made

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What cheese is

Cheese is milk made solid and concentrated. Strictly, it is "the fresh or matured product obtained by draining the whey after coagulation of casein."

Making it takes four steps:

• Curdle the milk, with the enzyme rennet or with lactic acid.
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• Drain away the liquid whey from the firm curd.
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• Press the curd, which gives the cheese its shape.
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• Ripen it. Over time a rind forms and the flavor develops.
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How rennet and acid set milk is explained with the other proteins. see chapter 7: Milk and soy

How the curd was set helps tell cheeses apart. Cottage cheese and cream cheese are set with acid. Provolone has a stretched curd.

Kinds of cheese

With some exceptions, cheese falls into five broad groups:

• Fresh: very moist and not ripened at all. Examples: ricotta, quark, cottage cheese, cream cheese and baker's cheese.
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• Soft: usually some rind around a soft inside. Example: feta.
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• Semi-soft: not ripened, with moisture that varies. Example: mozzarella.
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• Firm: well ripened, fairly low in moisture and fairly high in fat. Examples: Swiss cheese, cheddar and brick.
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• Hard: aged a long time, with very little moisture. Example: Parmesan.
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Cheese can also be grouped by texture and by how long it ripens, and then some cheeses land in a different group. Feta goes with the semisoft ripened cheeses, and mozzarella with the firm unripened ones.

Cheese grouped by texture and ripening.

A few cheeses in that list have traits of their own:

• Cheddar is ripened by bacteria and holds about 33% fat and 37% moisture.
• Swiss cheese is ripened by bacteria that make gas.
• Provolone has a stretched curd and is smoked.
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• Parmesan and Romano are so hard and grainy that they must be grated.
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• Roquefort is a blue cheese made from ewes' milk in Roquefort, France.
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Fresh cheeses

The cheeses bakers are most likely to use are fresh ones. Each is made in its own way:

• Cottage cheese, dry curd: an acid cheese, soft and not ripened. Lactic-acid bacteria and rennet go into pasteurized skim milk. When it clots, it is cut into cubes and gently cooked until the curds firm up. The whey is drained, and the curd is rinsed and chilled in cold water.
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• Creamed cottage cheese: dry curd mixed with a cream dressing. The dressing sets the fat level: 4% for regular, or 1–2% for low fat.
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• Baker's cheese: made like dry curd cottage cheese up to the cutting of the curd, but never cooked. The curd drains in cloth bags or goes through a machine called a curd concentrator. It has about 4% fat.
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• Quark (or quarg): like baker's cheese, but soured with lactic-acid bacteria and blended with cream into a smooth spread of about 7% fat. Low-fat kinds exist, and rich ones go up to 18%. It is mild and smooth, and can often replace sour cream, cottage cheese or ricotta.
• Cream cheese: a soft, unripened, acid cheese. A mix of milk and cream is homogenized and pasteurized. Once it has cooled to about 27°C (80°F), lactic-acid bacteria go in. The curd is stirred smooth rather than cut, held at about 50°C (122°F) for an hour, then drained. Regular cream cheese is quite rich, but lighter kinds are sold.
• Ricotta: milk or whey heated with an acid until curds form, then strained. Cooks once used lemon juice or vinegar; factories now use a bacterial culture. It goes into both sweet and savory dishes.
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• Mascarpone: made like ricotta, but from cream. The cream is soured, often with tartaric acid, and heated to 85°C (185°F) until curds fall out. No starter culture or rennet is used. It is lightly salted and usually whipped. Rich and smooth, it can replace cream or butter, and is used mostly in desserts. Tiramisu, the Italian dessert, is its best-known use.

In baking, fresh cheeses fill pastries and coffee cakes, go into fried pastries such as cannoli, and make cheesecakes, sometimes mixed with richer cream cheese. For these jobs one fresh cheese can mostly stand in for another. Strain a coarse one first if needed. Firmer cheeses go into cheese bread, quiche, pizza and cheese straws.

Process cheese and cheese spreads

Process cheese is made by heating and stirring together one or more cheeses, of one kind or several, then blending in an emulsifier. A little acid, cream, water, spice or flavoring may go in too. Process cheddar has no more than 40% moisture and at least 32% fat. American process cheese is one example.

• Cheese food is made the same way, but milk, skim milk, whey or their concentrates may be added. It has no more than 44% moisture and at least 23% fat.
• Process cheese spread is like cheese food but may hold stabilizers, more water and less fat. It must spread at 70°F. Process cheddar spread has 44–60% moisture and at least 20% fat.
• Products that meet none of these standards may be labeled "imitation cheese" or "cheese products".

A cheese labeled "reduced fat" must have at least 25% less fat than the standard for that cheese.

Storing cheese

Mold grows on cheese kept somewhere warm, dark and a little damp. It shows as a bluish-green, hairy growth. Cheese that is spoiling also turns darker and smells sour. Dairy is kept at 2–4°C (36–39°F), covered and away from strong smells, and pastries filled with cheese or cream count as potentially hazardous foods.