Testing cheese before brining

Transcript

Miel Meyer - Meyer Gouda Cheese

Once you’ve pressed the cheese, we put it onto the table to just sit and rest to let the bacteria keep growing. Eventually later on in the evening, you’ll see a colour change in the cheese. It’s not visible for the average person, but if you’re trained, you’ll see these changes, and that’s when we know it’s ready for the brining. The pH has reached a good level.

The brining helps reduce the rate at which the bacteria are growing, it slows down that pH reduction. And that’s why we need to make sure the pH has been achieved before we brine it, because if you brine it too soon, then it’s going to be much harder for the cheese to reach the pH that we require, and then also the risk of spoilage of that cheese is increased.

With the New Zealand Food Safety Authority, which we’re a big part of obviously, we measure pH. So that’s reaffirming that our traditional methods of pH change are still viable, but for food safety reasons, we have to document those pH changes.