HOW CHEESE IS MADE

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 3248, 19 January 1926, Page 5

HOW CHEESE IS MADE

SIMPLY EXPLAINED. To the naked eye milk seem* a white liquid not at all transparent; but looked at through a inlcroscope it appears a bluish transparent liquid filled with round floating balls of fat, each enclosed in a separate thin skin of albumen. These little halls are so small that if 10,000 of them w'ere placed In a row they would measure scarcely an inch. When milk is set away in pans in a cool place for a tew hours, these balls of Cat rise to the top by thousands and form the rich yellow' crust called ©ream. By churning the cream butter is made. After the cream has been taken off for the purpose of butter-making what remains ,is , called skim-milk. Skim milk consists of curd from which cheese is made, and of whey, a thin, watery, liquid in which the curd is dissolved.

In making cheese the curd, or what the chemists call casein, must first be separated from the whey or watery part. This is done naturally when the milk turns sour. But the “casein” of sour milk will not make good cheese, so the curd has to be separated while the milk is sweet. This Is done by putting an acid juice called rennet (originally made from the dried interior of the stomach of a calf) into the milk which has been warmed to a certain temperature. The acid in the rennet turns the sugar in the milk and remaining portions of cream Into lactic acid, which mixing with the curd and cream curdles. In about an hour or so the curd will be found to have separated from the whey and settled at the bottom. The whey is then drained off and the curd is salted and pressed in a cheese press for two or three days, when it is put away in a room to ripen. Some cheeses ripen in a few months, but others, like the Italian Parmesan, take two or three years.