Global Cheesemaking Technology

Cheese Quality and Characteristics

Photis Papademas, Thomas Bintsis, Photis Papademas, Thomas Bintsis

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781119046158
• eBook ISBN: 9781119046189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Food Science
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Global Cheesemaking Technology: Cheese Quality and Characteristics reviews cheesemaking practices, and describes cheeses and the processes from which they are manufactured. In addition, the book examines new areas to stimulate further research in addition to the already established knowledge on the scientific principles on cheesemaking.

Part I provides an account on the history of cheese, factors influencing the physicochemical properties, flavour development and sensory characteristics, microbial ecology and cheese safety, traceability and authentication of cheeses with protected labels, and traditional wooden equipment used for cheesemaking, while an overview of the cheesemaking process is also presented.

Part II describes 100 global cheeses from 17 countries, divided into 13 categories. The cheeses described are well-known types produced in large quantities worldwide, together with some important locally produced, in order to stimulate scientific interest in these cheese varieties. Each category is presented in a separate chapter with relevant research on each cheese and extensive referencing to facilitate further reading.

Part I

Chapter 1
The History of Cheese

Paul S. Kindstedt

Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences,, University of Vermont, US

1.1 Introduction

The International Dairy Federation estimated that global cheese production in 2015 totalled approximately 23 million tonnes (IDF, 2016). This production was spread across six continents and included cheese made mainly from cow (20.7 million tonnes) milk. The remainder is composed of cheese from other species (buffalo, goat and sheep) as well as home-made and farmstead cheeses which do not appear in national statistics. How did this come about? More specifically, where, when and why did cheesemaking begin, how did it spread and evolve, and how did cheese attain such diversity, widespread distribution and prominence in our time? Although our understanding of the history of cheese remains very incomplete, various pieces of this vast puzzle can be fitted together to form a narrative that provides context for global cheesemaking in the twenty-first century.

1.2 Origins of Cheese

Until recently, the origins of cheese have remained mostly shrouded in the impenetrable fog of ancient prehistory. During the past two decades, however, groundbreaking advances in widely ranging fields of research and scholarship have yielded new insights into humanity's earliest experiences with cheese. Indeed, the convergence of multiple trains of research has pushed the likely beginnings of cheesemaking back to the Neolithic, perhaps nearly all the way back to the very origins of livestock domestication and dairying, which provided the context for the emergence of cheese.

Sheep and goats were first domesticated in the upper Euphrates and Tigris River valleys of Southwest Asia, as inferred from the study of archaeological skeletal remains. Advances in techniques to recover, evaluate and statistically analyse skeletal and dental remains for vital diagnostic characteristics such as size, sex and age of the animal at death, along with advances in interpretive frameworks based on ethnographic modelling of management strategies used by semi-nomadic shepherds in Southwest Asia today, have led to breakthroughs in the ability to detect the emergence, and track the spread, of livestock domestication (Vigne, 2011; Vigne & Helmer, 2007). Archaeozoological data clearly demonstrate the occurrence of drastic changes in the slaughtering profiles of sheep and goats, considered indicative of the onset of domestication, around the middle of the 9th millennium BC (Helmer, Gourichon & Vila, 2007; Vigne, 2011; Vigne et al., 2011). Similarly, cattle were also domesticated in the Middle Euphrates basin slightly later, again based on archaeozoological analyses (Vigne, 2011). Furthermore, mitochondrial genetic studies of modern sheep, goats and cattle, along with analyses of mitochondrial DNA extracted from Neolithic skeletal remains, also support the conclusion that the earliest domestication of these livestock occurred in the Fertile Crescent region of Southwest Asia (Bollongino et al., 2012; Bonfiglio et al., 2012; Conolly et al., 2012; Edwards et al., 2007; Hiendleder et al., 2002; Meadows et al., 2007; Naderi et al., 2008). Thus, a considerable body of evidence indicates that goat, sheep and cattle domestication occurred for the first time in the same general region of the upper Fertile Crescent, aptly dubbed the ‘cradle of agriculture’, where the initial domestication of key founder grain crops such as wheat, barley, lentil, pea and chickpea also took place several centuries earlier (Weiss & Zohary, 2011).

It has been widely (though not universally) presumed that domesticated livestock in Southwest Asia were initially raised for their meat, hides and other products resulting from the animals' slaughter, and that the milking of goats, sheep and cattle did not commence until much later, for example, around the 4th millennium bc during the so-called ‘secondary products revolution’ (Sherratt, 1981, 1983). However, current archaeozoological and archaeochemical findings reveal that dairying was practised much earlier. For example, analyses of dental remains testify to the occurrence of sheep and goat slaughtering profiles, as early as the late 9th millennium bc, that are consistent with milk production (Helmer, Gourichon & Vila, 2007). Dairying practices appear to have then spread rapidly beyond their initial areas of origin, such that by the 8th millennium bc, Neolithic migrants from the northern Levantine mainland had transported domestic sheep and goats to Cyprus, where the animals were raised partly for milk production, as inferred from the early culling profiles observed there (Vigne, 2008; Vigne et al., 2011). Around the same period, archaeozoological remains of domestic cattle in the Northern Levant show similar evidence of culling strategies indicative of milking (Vigne & Helmer, 2007), which eventually spread to central and western Anatolia by the 7th millennium bc (Çakirlar, 2012; Evershed et al., 2008). Thus, ample indirect archaeozoological evidence points to dairying being practised almost from the beginning of the Neolithic when livestock were first domesticated. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to postulate that the harvesting of milk for human consumption may have been among the original reasons that inspired Neolithic farmers to domesticate ruminant livestock in the first place (Vigne, 2008; Vigne & Helmer, 2007).

The first direct evidence for dairying in the archaeological record, however, had to wait until the dawn of pottery making, during the 7th millennium bc. Recent advances in analytical techniques to recover lipid residues preserved within the fabric of ancient unglazed pottery sherds, and to identify the lipid sources based on stable carbon isotope (C¹² and C¹³) content, have enabled archaeochemists to reconstruct the contents of many ancient Neolithic pots at the time of their use (Dudd & Evershed, 1998; Mottram et al., 1999). Using this approach, Evershed et al. (2008) demonstrated definitively, and Thissen et al. (2010) corroborated, that milk production occurred as early as the 7th millennium bc in western Anatolia.

This same analytical approach has also made it possible to track the ancient practice of milk production through time and space by analysing pottery remains left behind by migrating Neolithic farmers. For example, a growing body of evidence in the field of archaeoclimatology strongly suggests that a substantial rise in sea level, followed by a major episode of climatic cooling, occurred during the late 7th millennium bc, which in turn precipitated social collapse among Neolithic farmers in Southwest Asia and triggered large-scale migrations out of Southwest Asia into Europe and elsewhere (Clare et al., 2008; Pross et al., 2009; Turney & Brown, 2007; Weninger et al., 2006). Among the evidence for Neolithic migration from Anatolia to Europe around this time are the analyses of potsherds recovered from the Balkan Peninsula that chronicle the spread of dairying as migrating Neolithic farmers transported their pottery-making technology and dairy subsistence strategy with them (Evershed et al., 2008). From there, Neolithic farmers continued their migration into Central, Eastern and Southern Europe by the 6th millennium BC (Craig et al., 2005; Salque et al., 2012; Spangenberg, Jacomet, & Schibler, 2006), the British Isles by the 5th millennium bc (Copley et al., 2003; Copley et al., 2005a, 2005b), and the Western Baltic region, Scandinavia and Finland by the 5th/4th millennium bc (Craig et al., 2011; Cramp et al., 2014; Isaksson & Hallgren, 2012), leaving behind a trail of potsherds containing milk fat residues. Similar analyses have also confirmed the occurrence of dairying as early as the 5th mil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Part I
• Part II
• Index
• End User License Agreement