Cheese making

Cheesemaking (or caseiculture) is the craft of making cheese, which dates back at least 5,000 years. Archaeological evidence exists of Egyptian cheese being made in the ancient Egyptian civilizations.

The production of cheese, like many other food preservation processes, allows the nutritional and economic value of a food material, in this case milk, to be preserved. It allows the consumer to choose (within limits) when to consume the food rather than have to consume it straight away, and it allows the product to be altered which gives it higher value.

There are many theories about the origins of cheese. Cheesemaking may have originated from nomadic herdsmen who stored milk in vessels made from the sheep's and goats' stomachs. Because their stomach linings contains a mix of lactic acid, wild bacteria as milk contaminants and rennet, the milk would ferment and coagulate. Cheese, like other dairy products, “seems to bear the hallmark of pastoral nomads of Central Asia, who used animal stomach bags and untanned leather pouches as containers. Since the lining of the calf’s stomach contains the enzyme (rennin) that produces the curdling agent, rennet, milk kept in a calf’s stomach bag would turn to cheese more or less of its own accord.” A product reminiscent of yogurt would have been produced, which, through gentle agitation and the separation of curds from whey would have resulted in the production of cheese; the cheese being essentially a concentration of the major milk protein, casein, and milk fat. The whey proteins, other minor milk proteins, and the lactose are all removed in the cheese whey. Another theory is offered by David Asher, who wrote that the origins actually lie within the “sloppy milk bucket in later European culture, it having gone unwashed and containing all of the necessary bacteria to facilitate the ecology of cheese.”

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