Cheese: An Overview

Cheese is the generic name for a group of fermented milk-based food products, produced in a wide range of flavors and forms throughout the world. Although the primary objective of cheesemaking is to conserve the principal constituents of milk, cheese has evolved to become a food of haute cuisine with epicurean qualities, as well as being highly nutritious. Sandine and Elliker (1970) suggested that there are more than 1000 varieties of cheese. Walter and Hargrove (1972) described more than 400 varieties and listed the names of a further 400, while Burkhalter (1981) classified 510 varieties (although some are listed more than once). As discussed in detail in Chapter 31, a number of attempts have been made to classify cheese varieties into meaningful groups. The most common criterion for the classification is texture (very hard, hard, semihard, semisoft, soft), which is related mainly to the moisture content of the cheese. Various attempts have been made to improve on this basis of classification, for example, by including the milk-producing species, moisture to protein ratio, method of coagulation, cooking temperature, microbiota. These classification schemes are discussed in Chapter 26. However, no classification scheme developed to date is completely satisfactory; the inclusion of chemical indices of ripening would be useful.