Cheese Curdled Bos taurus milk
Grate it cold, melt it warm. Cheese dropped into a boiling sauce splits every time.
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In the kitchen
Under heat
Fat separates from protein if it melts too fast — low, gentle heat is what keeps a cheese sauce smooth instead of split and greasy.
Against air
A cut face dries and hardens within a day uncovered; wrapped tight, most hard cheeses last for weeks.
In storage
Wrap in paper, not plastic, if you can — cheese needs to breathe a little or it sweats and molds faster.
At the shop
Sharper, more aged cheddar has less moisture and melts less smoothly than mild — pick by what you’re using it for.
Which variety, for what
- Mild cheddar
- Higher moisture, melts smoothly — the better choice for a sauce or grilled cheese.
- Sharp / extra sharp cheddar
- Aged longer, drier, and more crumbly — more flavor per gram but less melt.
Beyond the kitchen
PROBABLY DISCOVERED IN A STOMACH
The standard account is that milk carried in a bag made from a young ruminant's stomach curdled from residual rennet. It is unprovable and entirely plausible — rennet from calf stomach remained the standard coagulant for millennia and is still used for many traditional cheeses.
MOST RENNET IS NOW MICROBIAL
Since the 1990s the majority of industrial cheese has been made with chymosin produced by genetically modified microorganisms rather than from calf stomachs. It was one of the first such products approved for food use anywhere.
THE HOLES ARE BACTERIA
The eyes in Emmental are carbon dioxide from Propionibacterium freudenreichii. Improved milking hygiene in recent decades reduced the hay particles the bubbles formed around, and Swiss producers found their holes shrinking — so some now add hay dust deliberately.
PROTECTED BY LAW
Parmigiano Reggiano, Roquefort, Comté and hundreds of others are legally protected designations specifying milk source, method and region. Parmigiano wheels are inspected and branded individually, and rejected wheels have their rind scored to make the mark unusable.
A longer history
Cheesemaking is at least seven thousand years old: perforated pottery vessels from Neolithic Poland have been shown by residue analysis to be cheese strainers, and Egyptian tomb finds include identifiable cheese. Like yoghurt, it solved two problems at once — it preserved milk, and it removed most of the lactose.
Roman writers describe cheesemaking in technical detail, and Roman armies carried it. European monasteries developed and recorded many of the styles that still exist, and the great mountain cheeses — Comté, Gruyère, Emmental — arose from the practical need to turn a summer alpine milk surplus into something that would keep through winter and be carried down the mountain.
Industrial cheesemaking began in the nineteenth century, and processed cheese was patented in Switzerland in 1911 and commercialised in America by James Kraft. The late twentieth century brought a strong countermovement: protected designations of origin, raw-milk advocacy and a revival of farmhouse production, which is why traditional cheese is more available now than it was fifty years ago.
