Coagulating the milk

Transcript

Miel Meyer – Meyer Gouda Cheese

The beauty of cheese is that it takes a long time to go off, and part of that reason is in the acidity and then adding of the rennet, which reduces the moisture from the cheese.

Rennet is an extract from a calf’s stomach. It nowadays can be synthetically made. We choose to still use a natural calf rennet to keep in line with our traditional product.

So once we’ve pasteurised the milk, we add a starter culture, so this is a mesophilic anaerobic culture. Once it grows in the milk, it slightly acidifies the milk.

We add the rennet slightly after the starter and then we give it quite a lot of time to rest and then to coagulate, and that’s the solidifying of the milk.

I think that’s the magic of cheese is, once you add the rennet, it forces the milk solids to come together and the milk liquid, which essentially is water, to leave that solid behind.