General Aspects of Cheese Technology

Abstract This chapter describes the steps involved in the cheese making process, explaining their purpose and then describes the equipment and manufacturing processes that have been developed to facilitate large scale cheese manufacture. The initial focus is on the common processing steps to the end of the vat stage of manufacture, including descriptions of common cheese vat configurations. This is followed by discussion of the technology used for postvat processing for different cheese groups including dry salt varieties (cheddaring, stirring, milling, salting, block forming and packaging) and brine salt varieties (prepressing, block filling, pressing and brining). Continuous or semicontinuous production methods are described as an alternative to the traditional batch process. A section is also dedicated to processing equipment for pasta filata cheeses, such as cooker-stretchers and extruders. The chapter then moves to a discussion of recent processing developments designed to optimize cheese offerings with an end customer or consumer in mind, such as individually quick-frozen cheese shreds for pizza use and multistage drying of cheese ingredients for processed cheese manufacture. This is followed by a review of more recent technological advances in cheese manufacturing wherein the entire cheese processing is reenvisioned. Such processes include the uncoupling of curd formation from renneting and the removal of separate curd formation and dewheying operations in processes that are made possible by borrowing technologies traditionally used only in the manufacture of noncheese dairy products.