Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Cheese (Encore)

Episode Date: July 10, 2022

It can be consumed in blocks or wheels, strings or curds, slices or cubes.  It can be soft or hard, fresh or old, and it can even be consumed if it smells bad and has mold on it. Pizza, hamburgers, and crackers depend on it, yet it can also be eaten by itself. I am of course talking about cheese. Learn more about cheese, how it was discovered, and how it is made, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Search Past Episodes at fathom.fm Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast." or "Everything Everywhere is part of the Airwave Media podcast network Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. It can be consumed in blocks or wheels, strings, or curds, slices, or cubes. It can be hard or soft, fresh or old, and can even be consumed if it smells bad or has mold on it. Pizzo's hamburgers and crackers all depend on it, yet it can also be eaten by itself. I am, of course, talking about cheese. Learn more about cheese, how it was discovered and how it's made on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Cheese is one of those things that dates back before recorded human history. We have no clue who discovered cheese or where the discovery was made. Pretty much as far back as we can document human civilization, there was always some form of cheese. It is believed, and quite reasonably, I think,

that cheese was discovered around the same time that humans began domesticating animals. That means the first cheeses would have been made from sheep or goat milk, not milk from cows. There are a couple of theories as to how cheese was discovered. The first theory is that it was probably accidentally discovered by someone who was transporting liquid milk in a bladder made from the stomach of a ruminant animal. Inside the stomach would have been trace amounts of the enzyme known as redent. When exposed to rennet, milk would start to curdle to form cheese.

Someone then opened up their milk bladder and found that there was a solid inside. They ate it and, voila, cheese was born. The other theory is that someone added fruit or fruit juice to milk. The acid in the fruit would have caused the curdling and, voila, cheese was born. However it happened, cheese was actually a really important innovation for humans. Milk allowed humans to extract more calories from animals beyond just meat. If you slaughter an animal, you can eat it, but that's it. If you can extract milk, however, you can consume calories for possibly years before you consume the animal for meat.

Cheese was important because it allowed people to store milk, which would otherwise spoil rather quickly. There really wasn't much in the way of an ancient trade in fluid milk like there was in other foodstuffs, because it wouldn't last long without refrigeration. Cheese, on the other hand, could last for years, theoretically, and moreover, it was the only real way to store dairy in hot climates. In cold climates, cheese was another way to consume calories during the winter that you might have stored during the summer. Our evidence for cheese making and cheese consumption goes way back in time.

The earliest evidence comes from clay sieves found in many sites in Europe, which date back about 8,000 years. They were used to separate solid curds from liquid waste, chemical analysis of the pottery found traces of cheese on the interior of the sieve. Ancient Samarian texts dating back 4,000 years refer to cheese, and tablets from the Mycans on the island of Crete documented the storage of cheese in their warehouses. Actual physical cheese has been found in tombs in the Xinjiang region of China, which has been dated to be 3,600 years old. A solid white mass was found in a jar in a tomb in Egypt,

which was chemically found to be cheese, and it was 3,000 years old. And just as an aside on the topic of really old cheese, in 2012, a cheesemaker from Wisconsin found some cheddar cheese that he had made back in 1972 in the back of his cooler. It turned out that the 40-year-old cheese was very edible. He sold it to a cheese shop which made it available in very small quantities to customers. Supposedly, it had an extremely sharp intense taste and could only be consumed in very small amounts. We know that cheesemaking had advanced to a point in ancient Rome where there were many different varieties that were available and they were imported from all over the Roman world. Until the European

age of exploration, cheese making was mostly confined to Europe and the Middle East. There were some small-scale cheese making in China and India, but nothing like what would be found elsewhere. So cheese has been around the world a really long time, and I'm sure all of you know what cheese is, but what is it really? How do you make cheese? I should note that there are different ways to make cheese. The steps I'm going to describe are how most cheeses are made, but there are some types of cheeses that might use different steps or different ingredients. The first step is to heat the milk to encourage the growth of bacteria which will consume lactose and turn it into lactic acid. The type of bacteria use can create

different cheeses. Some bacteria only produce lactic acid and others can produce gases as well like carbon dioxide. If gases are produced, you can end up with a cheese with holes in it from the bubbles like Swiss cheese. The next important step is the addition of the enzyme rennet. This was the enzyme I mentioned before which can be found naturally in the stomach of ruminant animals. The retinent will cause the primary protein in milk called casein to precipitate. The casein will form a solid matrix with milk fat trapped inside of it. Most rennet today will not come from animal stomachs. It comes from microbial production or alternatives are used which can produce similar results. This process will form solids known as curds. The longer the process is allowed

to go on, the larger the curds that can form. Cottage cheese is a cheese with very small curds. In some places like Wisconsin and Quebec, you can find fresh cheese curds which are much larger. Next, the solid curds need to be separated from the liquid away. This can be done in any number of ways. Traditionally, you might put it in a porous cloth, aka a cheese cloth, and squeeze out the liquid. It can also be dehydrated by increasing the temperature of the curds. Here I should note that cheese that hasn't fully aged and isn't fully dehydrated is known as green cheese, and it has nothing to do with the color green. The word green refers to being fresh and not ripe, the same as the word greenhorn. Most green cheeses are actually white in color. This is where

the phrase the moon is made out of green cheese comes from. It looks like a wheel of white cheese without a rind. Salt will sometimes be added at this point as well. In addition to flavor, salt will stop the growth of some bacteria. The curds will be treated differently depending on the cheese. There's a process known as cheddaring, where the curd man. mats are cut up and stacked on each other to remove way at the bottom of the pile. They're turned over about every 10 minutes using the weight of the stack to expel moisture. Mozilla cheese curds are stretched and kneaded like taffy, which is why when you buy it in a raw form, it sometimes looks like a knot or just a round ball.

Finally, the cheese may be put into a mold for aging and ripening. Some cheeses might be bound in wax, like Gouda, and others allow for bacteria and mold to grow on the exterior to create a rind. It is estimated that there are over 1,800 different types of cheese in the world today. The way you get different cheeses is by variations of the inputs and methods that I just described. For example, there are cheeses made from the milk of cows, sheep, goats, camels, donkeys, yaks, buffalo, moose, and yes, I know you're thinking it, even humans. There are cheeses that are native to every continent except Antarctica,

and I'm sure some scientists might yet check that one off one winter when they're bored. There are some specific cheeses that I think deserve special mention, some of which you may never have heard of, and others I'm quite sure you have. One of the rarest cheeses is a cheese from Italy known as Beto. It's only produced in one valley in the Lombardy region in the north, and it's a mixture of cow and goat milk. What is noticeable about it is that it's aged longer than pretty much any other cheese. It's common to age Beto for 10 to 20 years. The result is a cheese that costs $150 per pound, and one 15-year-old wheel of, of Bito once sold for $6,500 in China.

The second most expensive cheese in the world comes from Sweden. It's made only in the town of Beerholm, and the reason it's so expensive is that it's made out of moose milk, and it all comes from three domesticated moose, and I haven't a clue how you go about milking a moose, and it will sell for $500 a pound. The most expensive cheese in the world comes from Serbia in the Zasavica Special Nature Reserve. They create a cheese known as Pule, which is made from the milk of the endangered Balkan donkey, and it will sell for $600 a pound. One question many people have is, can you eat the white rind on brie cheese?

And the answer to that is, yes, you absolutely can. The rine is made from a mold that is totally edible. If the exterior of a cheese is bright red, that's usually just wax, and you shouldn't be eating that. However, if it's orange, like on a stilton cheese, that too is edible. Why are blue cheeses blue? Blue cheeses are cheeses that have cultures of mold known as penicillium. And yes, they are related to the same mold that was used to create the antibiotic known as penicillin. However, the penicillium in cheese does not necessarily kill all bacteria.

Some blue cheeses are known as stinky cheeses. The smell usually comes from a bacteria known as a brevi bacterium lenis, which is the same bacteria which is responsible for foot odor. So, yeah, it's not a coincidence. One stinky cheese that is not a blue cheese is Limburger. It's so smelly that it used to be used in old cartoons as a reference for anything that smelled really bad. And yeah, you can still buy Limburger in most stores around where I live in Wisconsin. One of the most famous, and personally my favorite cheese in the whole world, is Roquefort. It is a blue sheep's milk cheese that's only made in one region in southern France.

Legend has it that it was discovered when a young boy in a cave was eating his lunch of bread and cheese, when he saw a beautiful girl in the distance. He dropped his food to go meet her. He totally forgot about the food and found it a few months later when the mold from the bread had created Roquefort cheese. It was the favorite cheese of Emperor Charlemagne. According to legend again, he passed through an abbey in the south of France

where he was served Roquefort cheese. He began cutting away the blue parts and was told by the local bishop that he was removing the best part of the cheese. Thereafter, two carts of Roquefort cheese were delivered to the emperor every year. And that's why it's known as the cheese of and popes. Today, there are over 22 million tons of cheese produced annually in the world.

The largest cheese producing country is the United States, which makes over 6 million tons a year. And the largest cheese producing state is, of course, Wisconsin. True story, years ago they held a competition for a slogan to put on the new Wisconsin license plates. One of the ideas submitted, which actually had some support, was eat cheese or die. If you are really into cheese, you might be happy to know that there is a community of cheese aficionados that's very similar to the of wine. Just as there are Master Salmnier's who have shown mastery in the study of wine, so too is there the title of Master Frommage. Just like the mastery of wine, it takes years of study and knowledge of hundreds of cheeses and the cheese-making process.

Cheese is an ancient food that has never waned in popularity over thousands of years. It can be found in expensive, obscure varieties, as well as mass-produced cheese that can be found on pizza and in Cheese Whiz. And it's all due to what was probably just an accidental discovery, thousands of years ago by a shepherd who was just trying to carry home his milk from work. Everything everywhere daily is an airwave media podcast. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener Denise P. over at Podcast Republic. They write, love the show. So many interesting topics covered succinctly and well. How you managed to explain various classes of infinity using only audio in about 10 minutes

was amazing. I recommend this podcast a lot. Thank you. Well, thank you, Denise. I had a lot of trepidation about the Infinity episode. There are several subjects I'd like to do episodes on, but they're just too hard to do in an audio format. Perhaps sometime in the future, if the show grows big enough, I might be able to add a video component as well. Remember, if you leave a review or send in a question, you two can have it read on the show. I think it was blessed are the cheese makers. What's so special about the cheese makers? Well, obviously, it's not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.