4 Ingredients, 4 Very Different Cheeses
Cheese is made with the same four ingredients: milk, cultures, rennet, and salt. So how does it end with such a variety of flavors, textures, and appearances? As you might imagine, the answer is very complex, touching on all the steps of the cheesemaking process. But we want to give you some of the basics of how our four styles of cheese are made and some of the clues to why they end up the way they do!
This is the the smallest window into the vastly complex world of cheese! We always say our four cheeses are like our children, they all require an immense amount of attention, care, and love and one is always getting in trouble ;) We’ll start smallest to largest!
MOUNT ALICE: Mt. Alice is a “bloomy-rind” cheese, which means that it develops a white coat of Penicillium candidum and squiggly Geotrichum. This category of cheeses is often soft and gooey and has a wide range of flavors. Our Mt. Alice typically exhibits buttery, mushroom-y, and brassica flavors when aged. This texture and flavor development is due to the high moisture content of the cheese and the action of the yeasts and molds on the rind, which break down chemical bonds and alter proteins and fat, causing the wheel to soften from the outside in (called external ripening)! When we make this cheese we follow strict targets for acidity, moisture content, size, and salt content, to make sure the rind flora are happy. If we don’t set the right conditions for rind development, we have big problems, so Mt. Alice takes a lot of attention!
OMA: Oma is a washed rind cheese and similarly to Mt. Alice an externally ripened cheese. After Oma is made and salted, the outside of the cheese grows yeasts that neutralize the acidity of the rind and create the perfect environment for (safe, delicious) bacteria to grow. It is then washed to smear the yeasts and bacteria over the entirety of the rind. This creates the “funk” we all love. Washed rind cheeses have all types of funky aromas and flavors but Oma tends to smell fruity (think papaya), meaty (think ham or salami), and have brassica notes (think broccoli or cauliflower). Oma is slightly lower moisture than Mt. Alice because we want it to age more slowly so that it has time to develop its rind flavors and aromas. Higher moisture cheese ripen much faster than lower moisture cheeses.
MAD RIVER BLUE: Mad River Blue is a whole different beast! When making a blue cheese you demineralize the curd. You do this by creating more acid production in the curd which causes it to expel calcium into the whey much faster than a cheese like Oma or Alice. This process of acidifying the curd quickly creates a completely different texture and is necessary for the Penicillium roqueforti, blue molds, to develop inside the cheese. This cheese starts out with a much lower pH and a very cake-y, crumbly curd texture. After a designated amount of time (a secret to our blue), we pierce the wheels to allow oxygen to enter the inside of the cheese. The blue molds are activated by the newly introduced oxygen and travel through the mechanical openings of the cheese creating “river” like paths of blue mold that are responsible for breaking down and softening the cheese from the inside out. This is called an internally ripened cheese and the result is a buttery smooth bite!
SAVAGE: Last but not least is Savage! This is an alpine style cheese that is “cooked” and pressed. Say what? Cooked you ask? Like all of our cheeses, each style has it’s own recipe and what we call “cheese technology” for the cheese make. Savage is a cheese that is low moisture and aged for a long time. We achieve this by cutting the curd very small (think pine nuts), heating (or “cooking”) the curds so that they expel water, and mechanically pressing the cheese under lots of pressure. Milk is 85% water. When this cheese goes into the aging vaults we want it to be 39% moisture! When a cheese is harder or lower moisture, it takes a long time for the enzymes in the cheese to break down the paste (interior) of the cheese. This leads to more subtle but complex flavors. Originally these hard cheeses were made in the mountains and were made this way so they could be transported without being damaged and eaten the following year when food supplies were lowest towards the end of the winter. So cool. Now we enjoy them year round but you’re still tasting the result of a long aging process!