Cheesemaking 101: Salting

Salting
Salting is the last essential step in the cheesemaking process. While a cheese is still a cheese without salt, very few cheeses are made without it. This is mostly for flavour reasons - saltless cheese tastes very bland to our salt-attuned taste buds. However there are some cheeses which need the salt to encourage mould growth, and this is particularly true of blue moulds. It is one of the reasons why some blue cheeses can taste as if they have been over salted.

Salting is done either with a dry salt or by immersing the cheese in a brine bath. (Soft cheeses must be dry salted as they would fall apart in the brine.) Beyond that, it usually depends on the preference of the cheesemaker; in our case all of our cheeses apart from the fresh are brined.