Cheese Facts

• June
• 20

10:11 am Cheese

The British like their cheese. In fact the average Brit eats about 1 1/2 ounces of cheese a day. In the past 30 years, the number has doubled. Today, we can find cheese on everything; from pizza to sandwiches, in soups salads, on our fries and just about any food imaginable.

The problem is much of the saturated fats we are getting our diet come from cheese. On top of that, some of the most commonly eaten cheeses are very high in salt. Pile on that, we usually eat several servings of cheese in one sitting and you have a recipe for disaster.

When it comes to cheese, you want to make sure you get aged cheese like the Beenleigh Blue cheese. That way, you get more flavor for less fat. In addition, you don’t have to worry about all those lactose sugars which can cause many people a lot of problems.

You also want to keep an eye on the sodium. Many manufacturers are sneaking in tremendous amounts of sodium into their cheese. We all know one ounce of cheese isn’t very big, about the size of our thumb. Some cheeses can have anywhere from 10 to 20% of our daily sodium intake in one small little cube.

You want pay particular attention to some of the clever marketing tricks. Any cheese that isn’t processed can call itself natural.

The words lactose-free can be misleading. Just about all hard cheeses are lactose-free or pretty close to it. Like I said before, the lactose sugar in milk gets broken down by the bacteria that turn the milk and cheese. The same goes for low-carb. The only sugar in cheese is the lactose sugar. So the longer the cheeses ages, the lower the carbohydrates. Some cheeses have virtually zero carbohydrates. You want to be very careful in not getting cheese with any added sugars.

The final one is gluten-free. I laugh at these sorts of things but many of my clients said they weren’t aware cheese is supposed to be gluten-free. Glutens are only found in grains. Therefore, if you eat cheese has any glutens in them, the cheese was made in a factory that also produces breads or it was added artificially.

There are a lot of cheeses out there that meet these criteria. Most of them are older, aged cheeses that have a lot of flavor but not a lot of bad stuff. You just have to read your labels and be very careful. Also, visiting a reputable cheese shop is a great way to try many different kinds and ask the good questions.

Now lets look at the history of cheese making

Early cheese is believed to have been a practice of letting milk coagulate in sacks composed of the bladders from ruminants, due to the inherent supply of rennet within the organ.

A ruminant is a plant-digesting mammal with a multi-chambered stomach that softens food in the first chamber before regurgitating it and chewing it again. In fact, the name itself is derived from the Latin ruminare “to chew over again.” Rennet is produced organically in any mammalian stomach, and serves primarily as a milk digesting device.

The rennet within the walls of the bladder-sack would ferment and coagulate the milk, producing an item similar to yogurt. This would then have gone through a process of gentle agitation, serving to separate the curds from the liquid, and viola! Tiny lumps of cheese.

Prehistoric Cheese

The history of cheese is unique in that it has no traceable time of creation, supposedly predating recorded history; and despite there being no definitive proof indicating where fine cheese-making originated it is believed to have come from the Middle East, Central Asia, or Europe.

Before the coming of the Roman Empire cheese had already evolved into a complex business, fully becoming an everyday food and the creation itself an art-form amidst the beginnings of the empire. The process of curd pressing, salting, and cheese aging was spelled out in the work De Re Rustica (circa 65 CE), penned by Columella (whose works serve as our primary source of knowledge about Roman agriculture).

Romantic Cheeses

As Rome politely instructed newly conquered neighbors in the cheese-making ways of the Romans, the majority of Europe began to have a very diverse collection of cheeses due to the various villages crafting their own development procedures and products. This diversity in cheese-making can be found as well in manors and monasteries and, leaping forward to the present, has led to the British Cheese Board claiming there to be approximately 700 distinct cheese in today’s world.

Rewinding back to Roman times we find that the advancement of the fabled cheese-making art had stunted and, despite being a staple of commerce, was viewed as food of peasants. This thinking held throughout the Middle Ages, and it is in the Middle Ages we find the development of some of the most well known cheeses: Cheddar around 1500 CE, Parmesan in 1597, Gouda in 1697, and Camembert in 1791. Despite knowing the time-frames of their creation, it is impossible to know how much, if at all, they resemble the modern cheeses of the same names.

Say Cheese

While on the subject of modern cheese, the art of cheese-making was demoted to an assembly line production in 1815, in Switerzerland. However, large-scale production wasn’t introduced to the world until 1851, when the United States got into the game. In Rome, New York, a man named Jesse Williams begin to use the milk of farms near him, and within a few decades there were hundreds of these assembly-line associations.

By the turn of the century, cheese was being grown purely in microbial cultures due to the mass production of rennet in the 1860s, which allowed for a more controllable creation of cheese as the organic factor, the organic bacteria, had been removed.

This brings us to the modern market of today where factory-made cheese has replaced traditional since the WWII era, and more processed cheese is bought then ‘real’.