Cheesemaking 101: The Basics

The Basics
What is it that makes cheese cheese? Go to the dictionary and you will find that cheese is a "fermented milk product" - which is not particularly enlightening. However, if we take this definition apart, we can make some progress.

First, it is clear that cheese must be made from milk; it doesn't matter what milk - in theory the milk of any mammal will do, but in practice it almost always means the milk of a cow, sheep, goat or water buffalo. But a product made from, for example, soy beans, cannot, by definition, be cheese.

The second requirement is that the milk be fermented. We normally think o fermentation as a wine-making process, or as something that happens to things that have been in the back of the 'fridge too long - and in fact both of these are examples of fermentation. Fermentation is any process that involves the conversion of sugars into acid and gas. In cheesemaking the sugar involved is lactose, a form of sugar which occurs in all milks and accounts for 4% to 5% of the total milk volume.

The actual organisms doing the fermenting in cheesemaking belong to a group of bacteria called "lacto-bacilli", which simply means milk bacteria, and are more generally referred to as a dairy culture. The simplest example of these bacteria at work is yogurt: anyone who has made yogurt at home knows that by adding a "culture" (which can be a spoonful of store-bought yogurt) to warm milk, and then incubating the milk (keeping it warm) for several hours, the milk will set (i.e. form a curd), and the flavour will change from the sweet taste of fresh milk to the acid tang of yogurt. Yogurt, even if we don't think of it that way, meets the definition of "cheese". But most cheeses add extra steps to this simple two step process of culturing and incubation. Below you will find the extra processes which we use to produce our cheeses (but bear in mind that not all the cheeses use all the steps).