Historically High - The History of Cheese

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

Here we are. The History of Cheese. My love letter to cheese. Cultures. Milk. Rennet. Salt. That's all you need to start making cheese. The history starts prior to written history. The cheesemaking process was carried across the world by war and exploration. That process mixed with the nature and animals of the regions, helped shape unique new kinds of cheese. We have a lot to cover from cheese crime to cheese types to cheese games to cheese getting you high? Join us as we get Historically High on Cheese! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You had a faulty launch on the bell. It didn't feel like it went around either. I was trying to use it to think of some type of dairy pun related intro or anything like that. That intro really curdled on you. There you go. That's what we're looking for. This is a pretty special episode for me. This is something that I don't know if I would say since the dawn of this podcast,

but definitely since we started talking about teaching episodes, I've kind of been playing around with this idea of food staples in how they came about and how they came to be. And cheese is something that has brought families together. It has caused divorces because of some of the taste palettes being a little stinkier. This is the episode than no one ever knew that they really needed. It's fantastic. I've been studying for this episode my entire life. I don't think you're alone.

I think there are people, you know, if you were to really boil down how many foods have cheese in them, cheese-related, cheese flavored, anything like that, man, everyone's got a love of her with cheese. Cheese has changed the chemical makeup of humans' bodies. cheese has gone through so many different it's it's one wars it's been fought over uh it'll get you high we'll talk about that too there's so many things it's kind of like a what can't cheese do and this episode there's going to be some parts that are going to be pretty cheese nerdy i guess is the way to say it cheesy i that works too that's actually probably pretty apt but it's just fun and when i do these teaching episodes usually the shoes on the other foot usually

Usually Professor Chris is running through the fun stuff, and I'm talking about doctors murdering and different things like that. So to be able to just have a pure good episode feels so nice. An episode everyone can get behind. Yeah. Get behind. Get in your stomachs. I'm Professor Adam. That's Professor Chris. What's up? Go ahead and keep giving us those reviews. It's been fantastic to see just what you guys have thought about.

of our newer stuff that we've been doing. And it's always so funny to get just a random old review of something from an episode that we did four or five years ago. And it may have been something that we weren't quite solid on. But at the same time, I really can't say much because it's been three and a half years since we did it. And so I don't quite really remember what the angle was. At the same time, it's also so cool because you're going back and you're listening to

our old stuff. It's a little bit of us laying bare when we weren't really. is attuned to doing this as I think we are now. Yeah, I wonder what the, if you are a first time listener, and this is your first episode, listen to this episode, this is a great episode to be a first time listener on. But what we do ask of you is don't work your way back, because for some reason, or not for some,

understandable reasons, they're going to get worse once you get to our early stuff. So start at the early stuff. Know how good it can be because you heard the cheese episode, you know that you're going to get to more of the cheese episodes, but then go back and listen to it from the start, and then you can see how we grow. Find the evolution for us.

Keep subscribing. Those numbers are awesome. It's amazing to just go around and click on some of the other podcasts that I listen to just for enjoyment and see that our subscriber numbers because of you guys are kind of on par with some of them. Continue the ratings, five stars, if you can spare them. We love those. And Patreon.

Patreon, we have some very fun things that we've recorded lately. Not just companions to go along with episodes that we put out on here, but just kind of feeling our way out into this free space of thought. I kind of feel like the Patreon, which is patreon.com slash historically high. It's going to be a home for a lot of cool series that we're coming up with, Bad Biches of History. We're launching one that will have already launched right before July. life fourth that was he was president and so that's saying explore unknown presidents that no one

can ever remember um we're doing the drug salon which we're going to explore the history of different types of drugs so and then again we're going to be thrown in random shit that may or may not have to do with previous full length episodes that we've done so it's worth it guys get in there there's little fun game shows it keeps you entertained going into the weekends because we drop them on friday so all right you ready for a cheese explosion let's do it. I've always wanted to start an episode out this way. He's been somebody that I've always really love to listen to and watch and just see him explore the world. He feels like he's a pretty righteous dude. Anthony Bourdain said you have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money,

and your time, and cheese. Because it truly is a passion for so many people that are these artisan cheesemakers that are planting fields, that are bailing their own. hay that are taking their cows around, their goats around, their sheep around, their yaks around, to basically go from dirt to animal to milk to the process of making cheese. And I mean, it's a lifestyle. It almost makes you a little teary-eyed to realize that there's somebody who spends their entire life and livelihood and career to make this as good as it can be so we can put it on a hamburger.

Okay, this seems like common sense, but now that I think about it, I don't know how I'm having a revelation here, different animals with different diets, it can be the same type of cow. But if it has a different diet or if it feeds on this stuff at one time of the year, this time at other times of the year, you can get different cheeses coming out of the same cow or different cheeses just like you're saying by region. And it's not the fact that they're different animals in that region, although they can be. but it's because they live in different environments and they eat different things in that region. And that's how we get different cheeses? Partly, yes. It's going to be animal dependent, partly regional dependence, but kind of the main driver behind this, and we'll talk about it in the cheese making process, is the cultures that are used in the cheese making process to take the milk from cheese. I hope you don't mind that I'm going to be grilling you on this cheese several times throughout this episode.

And I'm also keeping track of cheese puns over here. So is that two? No, we're at four. Oh, four. Okay. Perfect. Drink every time you hear a cheese pun or smoke every time you hear a cheese pun. You will be asleep by the bathroom break.

The origins of cheese are pretty shaky at best. And it's just because it's so goddamn old. Cheese predates written history. And the only reason that we can kind of figure out, out how this happened before recorded history is this probably happened around the time of the domestication of sheep

and goats right around 8,000 BCE. Cheese monger? Is that a profession? Or is it fishmonger? Cheesemonger is a profession for selling cheese. I'll go you a step further. The study of cheese, you become a

phromologist. Okay. And had young Adam known as a boy that it would be possible, to become a cheese scientist, I feel like my life would have taken a completely different perspective. It's never too late to explore a passion, like friend. You can be an amateur pharmacologist. Okay, so cheese, I know we always kind of go back

and talk about world's oldest profession. I mean, you could probably put cheese monger in the top five, earliest professions. I wouldn't disagree, except for something that we're going to talk about that, I mean, it blows my mind. So 8,000 BCE, sheep's goats domesticated in the Fertile Crescent, kind of modern day Iran and around that area in Turkey. It said that sheep's milk was stored in the stomach of another animal.

They were used as storage containers for a lot of liquids at that point in time. There is an enzyme in the stomach called rennet, and this rennet is actually what coagulates cheese and separates curds from way. And again, we'll talk about that in the process. So there's a myth that there was a shepherd that was walking, carrying his stomach of milk, and was thirsty, went to pop, open the top of however you do that, and realized that there were just chunks sitting on top. He ate it. As soon as he ate it, he ate the first cheese that had ever been consumed by a human being, and the invention is born. It was a slight problem with that, because back around those times... You think there was a question there?

Where he was like, he opened it, he went to go, okay, all I'm thinking of in our, what is the R day and age version of that? It is when you were a kid and you went to the carton and you opened it and you went to go pour it. And for some reason that carton had been left in the fridge too long and you got a couple chewyes in there. Before you learn to sniff it first. Correct. There was always a patient or there was always a first time. Yes, but what I'm saying is that's kind of what happened, but at the same time, he's like, hmm, that ain't bad.

Yeah, and there's an absolute chance that that could have been how it happened. Human DNA at the time was set up in a way, I don't know if it's DNA or just how our bodies are made up. Pretty much everybody was lactose intolerant. Yes. So it would beg the question of why would you be bagging up milk to drink that would then make you, throw up out of your butt and feel like crap as you were up being shepherd, right?

Maybe that was just how it was. That was just that you didn't know any better. You just thought that's how you shit. Yeah, possibly. Wait a second. You mean there's something else other than diarrhea? Solid poop, you're sick. Something's wrong. It came out solid. I think I'm dying.

It won't stay liquid. I'm dehydrated. More likely, the mesopotamians were milking animals and had used a bit of heat exposure and bacteria, just not knowing because you have raw milk that contains bacteria. Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, pretty hot. All of a sudden you actually have a natural separating of curds in the way, just based upon those two elements. Again, this is kind of a shaky one for me too,

because they did use animals as wet nurses back then for their children. Okay. But if you're doing that, it wouldn't really make sense to be storing cheese somewhere else or be storing milk somewhere else. You know what I mean? Because what would you, what would you be doing with the overages? Yeah. Something that I've heard a couple times, it kind of makes me think that maybe they had a little better understanding of this was there is a belief that there was a chance that they had cut open a younger animal to eat. And when they cut open the stomach contents, they found cheese curds inside that stomach.

Okay. Because the rennet that I was talking about that was found in the other stomachs, that's a naturally occurring thing in, I forgot, ruminated animals that drink milk. Okay. That helps them break it down. Now, when a baby's body drinks milk, it doesn't digest the milk. When a baby's body drinks milk, it mixes with that rennet, it coagulates into the curds, and then your body actually digest the cheese curd. Gotcha. So you're not, like, milk doesn't.

turn into piss. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. Milk turns into a solid that then your body can digest. Gotcha. So they may have potentially opened up a younger animal that had been drinking for its mother's tea.

That makes sense to me because if you're thinking about storing something in a bladder and they were using those as containers, that will have probably been cleaned several, several times, dried out possibly or used to where there's not going to be that naturally occurring enzyme in there still left over because there's nothing biologically keeping it alive to create that enzyme. Mm-hmm. Okay. There's pottery that dates back to

we're at 5200 BCE in areas of turkey that they've actually found basically they were like strainers. It was a pot that had holes in the bottom of it. And when they swabbed those, they were finding milk fat molecules. Now, there's no other reason that you would need to strain milk like that unless you were straining way away from the curts.

Yeah. So this was happening in 5200. B.C.E. They said that it took right around 2 to 3,000 years for bodies that were lactose intolerant to develop a tolerance. And the reason that they

could do it was because cheese curds are extremely low in lactose. So it was slowly taking lactose in and being able to handle it and digest it in that way. It was the frog. Don't drop them in a boiling pot. He'll jump out. If you slowly raise the temperature, he'll boil.

Okay, yeah. So it was a slow game. Slow con. Cheese helped human beings develop a lactose tolerance. They changed the DNA inside of humanity to be able to handle milk. It's how they infiltrated it. It's how cheese establish its control. It's a long game. The other reason that they're seeing kind of the adaption of when milk happens is because

when these agrarian societies pop up and you start seeing farming culture instead of kind of the hunter-gatherer nomadic societies, when they're going through the bone records of these villages and areas that they knew were populated, they started finding older sets of cattle bones, goat bones, sheep bones, what have you, because if you are slaughtering these things for meat, you're only going to be able to get one, two years out before you have to slaughter it to eat it.

Do you think that there was ever, maybe you're going to get to it? Was there ever a time in which they looked at the density or health, of the bones due to the intake of an increase in calcium i didn't look that up i mean it would be very interesting to see in those i want to look that out those bone structures but in these more agrarian areas they started finding bones of animals that were 10 to 12 years old and the only reason that you'd be keeping something around that long is because you can get milk from it so these were female cows goats sheep that were being milked into a longer age than these former societies that used to slaughter these animals at a very young age for their meat.

It's so crazy just to see how that whole thing kind of could be gleaned from bone records, from pottery, and just to know that this is something that could naturally occur just based upon the bacteria in the milk and the heat that could separate out cheese, or that could separate curds in way. I'm going to ask a really stupid question. I've always taken, not to sound douche, but like way protein, everything like that. Can you please explain to me curds in a way? Like, I know what, like, if I order cheese curds, I know they're, you know, the little bit.

Please explain to me. Okay. So, in order to make cheese, you need four ingredients. You need milk. You need enzymes. You need rent it. And you need salt. We have a different process now a little bit than they did because we know how to pasteurize milk now.

And when you pasteurized milk, you kill all the bacteria good and bad. So pasteurized milk requires you to add the bacteria enzymes back into the cheese. And then when you add the rennet and it's heated up, the rennet is going to coagulate the cheese curd. So the proteins and everything like that, I believe it's called Kaysen. will start to bind itself together. And the coagulation that's going on from the bacteria is then basically pulling the water out of the curds. So once you're left with curds in whey, you're going to strain out all the curds off of it because you want to get as much moisture out as possible. What you're left with is way.

Way is the sugars. It's a lot of lactose. It's the protein elements and everything that's staying in the liquid state. Okay. Now, what you can do with Way, which I found out pretty fucking cool, is you can actually put it through a second milkmaking process because there's still proteins and things like that in there. This is how we get ricotta cheese. This is why it's such a fine, grainy structure that you can spread so thin because it's from the second cheese making process to pull what's left after the curds are already pulled. So that's why ricotta is always like, it's really spreadable, but it's also wet.

and you can see that there's a little bit of way on top. It's because it's made out of a secondary process. Okay. So you don't have the big clumps anymore because that protein has already - But you read it through again. Yeah. Yeah. And then if you're not doing that, you can use way to basically fertilize the ground. You can use it to feed other animals.

You can dry it out completely and turn it into way protein powder. And that's what you can do or what you can use. Okay. shit. It's very fascinating that you can get so many products from just milk. Yeah. It's kind of like the oil of drinkable things. Yeah, you know,

it really is. So in Greek mythology, Aristéis, who I believe is the son of Apollo, is the discoverer and the god of cheese. It is covered in so much literature, and

it's just so wild. So cheese is mentioned by Homer in both the Iliad in the Odyssey. Iliad, it is a key ingredient in a restorative potion. And in the Odyssey, the Cyclops is making sheep's and goats milk cheese. This is written 8th century B.C.E. Cheese is mentioned in the Bible. I believe it's First Samuel, which they believe was written somewhere around 10th century BCE.

Our old boy Pliny the Elmer, or Pliny the Elder from the Vesuvius episode, wrote about it in his natural histories in 77 CE. I believe we talked about it during the Spartan episode, but there was actually a rite of passage to steal a block of cheese. You have Egyptian tombs that have been exhumed. His name was Thames, I believe, at his burial site. He had pots of cheese that they tested back to 3,200 years ago in Egypt. They were making cheese in Egypt 3,200 years ago.

there was another burial in Xinjiang China where they found remnants of cheese which again East Asia is not known for cheese that's not really something that it's a part of their diet the cheese that they do make comes from yaks yaks milk cheese was traditionally what they used and I want to say they said over like the last 25 years cheese consumption in China

has gone up like 60%. Really? So it's almost like for as much as China, we always say, oh, they're trying to permeate our Western culture and fuck with us. Guess what? We sent a cheese missile back over to the Far East. That's right. We've permeated their culture now. Yeah, 1615 BCE in Asia.

And kind of one of the major drivers, this is one of those things where we've talked about pyramids, different technologies that have grown up on different continents, completely independent and separate from each other. Like how, like, you're like, well, the pyramid is the strongest structure and all that kind of stuff. And then you can say, well, cheese is technically possibly an accidental discovery. But then at the same time, someone still has to keep going along with it to keep advancing it or making new discoveries in it. There is no known cheese making procedures or any sort of cheese that has ever been found

or documented or recorded in the Americas. That was something that was wholly brought over to the new world. Like tomatoes to Italy? Yeah, yeah. I guess that was the return. It was tomatoes and peppers and everything like that coming backwards. Just along those lines, the Roman Empire was such a major driver in cheese making

through northern Africa and up into Europe. and it was a situation where Roman soldiers, Roman legions had been spread so far that it was going to be impossible for them to just try to continue sending in these supply lines cheese. So you would see these Roman legioners that would be like part-time cheesemakers that would be in an area in an area that they're occupying. They're teaching the people in that area how to make cheese so they can make cheese to supply these soldiers. Yeah. Each Roman legioner got an ounce of pecorino Romano. It's a hard sheep's milk

cheese a day. What? Legions are made up of 5,000 legioners? It varied. I'm not sure what the Roman equivalent was. It's a lot of fucking cheese. Anyway, you call it a thousand. Yeah. A thousand ounces of cheese a day

is what these soldiers are getting. That's a lot of cheese. The Russians. So yeah, you have to have that situation where you can spread out once you're spread out

once you're in these areas that you're occupying you need to start teaching the townspeople how to make cheese and it's not to say that they were the only driver like cheese hadn't made up to France or anywhere else in Europe before this but the level of cheese making that the Romans just like a lot of things that the Romans did the level

of cheese making that they had was kind of next level they knew how to mass produce cheese it shows up with Roman soldiers presence in the Netherlands in the 1st century BCE. There's an English presence of Roman cheesemaking in the 1st century CE. And going off of there, the post-Roman empire sees this shift of cheesemaking that's passed on to monasteries.

You have the Catholic Church that has all of these monasteries that are kind of ready-made to be cheesemakers. They have large swaths of land. They are... Lord is fuck. They got time on their hands. They're raising animals. they're not getting laid, they're studying. And really a part of this cheese making process is sort of just habitual movements.

As these monasteries are working to create this cheese, obviously they're creating it so they can give it to the church and sell the church, or so the church can basically keep buying up these swaths of land to pretty much do it. Fucking cheese monopoly. And they started creating these kind of specialized cheese types. that we'll talk about a little bit earlier, or a little bit later. Charlemagne loved a French Brees de Moll. He loved it so much that the French cheesemakers that were making it, he put a standing order in for weekly shipments brought to his royal court.

That was how much he was downing this Bres de Moll. King Charles I of 6th of France, love Rokefort cheese, a beautiful blue-veined blue cheese that we're going to talk about its origin story a little bit later on because it's just another funny just cheese myth that makes no sense. But the same time you hear it's like, well, how else would you have come up with this? Yeah. He declared it the only village that could make Roquefort cheese

was Roquefort-Sers-Zan. Nobody else outside of this one village could produce Roquefort, or it was punishable by death from the king. That was how much he loved it. Charles I of England demanded so much cheddar cheese that the royal court was purchasing batches of cheese before the milk was even made into cheese. They had just standing orders for,

okay, you're bringing in 10 gallons of cheese or 10 gallons of milk that makes one pound of cheese. Cheese is already ours. Mm-hmm. You're going to have to start milking more if you want to sell to anybody else but us. Then you have the beautiful, sad, colonial expansion of Great Britain in the 17th century as they're reaching out. And it becomes kind of a cheddar empire. Now, cheddar cheese, like we have on our beautiful cheese board that we've created for this episode.

Adam has taken me to fucking cheese town. I'm excited about this. I'm going to be trying these as he explains them. It is a smorgas board here. I apologize. Anyone that has the, I'm going to do my best. I'm going to have one hand on the mute button.

But I am excited to dig in this because honestly, I'm like, I have so many. Okay. I don't want to get ahead of myself because I know you're probably going to explain it. But so like, why cheddar? Is it because it was the easiest to make? How are you going to talk about blue cheese later? Oh, yeah.

Okay. We're getting, there are going to be things that are omitted. Okay. I'm not going to talk much about German cheese. It's there. It's awesome. I don't know how far, depending on how much this episode is loved. I mean, there's going to probably be branches off of this.

There's cheese that's made in Africa that is sounds delicious. There's all of the cheese. I mean, the thing about, cheese is you can really stretch it. So I mean, you can get other episodes. Five. We've probably made another one without me even realize it. All right. Give yourself six. So, cheddar cheese. Cheddar cheese comes from a village of cheddar in England.

Get the fuck out. Of course it does. But it's not. This is, here's, God damn it. I'm not even upset about this. There is going to be more information learned from this episode. just because cheese is such a big part of just society of than any other episode we've ever done. Just the fact that now people can be like, oh, do you know cheddar is a place?

Yeah. Cheddar cheese isn't named for the village as much as it's named for the cheese making procedure because there's a procedure called cheddaring cheese, which is where when you basically press all of the cheese curds together, you're going to cut them in blocks. Then you stack the blocks on top of each other and use the natural weight of the cheddar,

or the cheese curds to squeeze out the moisture on the bottom. And then you flip that stack over and you use gravity again to press that out. That process is called cheddaring. Okay. First of all, do you remember cheesing from South Park? Oh, yeah. When they would have the cats spray their shit in their face

and it was cheesing because it was Fawn to Do. And then Kenny and Randy first bolted it and they went to the land of heavy metal where it was all boobs, but they were really fighting in the public sandbox in the middle of town. He's like, what are you doing here, Ken? Get out of here.

Heavy metal. Getting back to this. All right, so explain to me this because I'm looking at these pieces of cheese here. They are very solid mass, like most cheeses when you see it. You're telling me that when they're making cheese, the cheese is always curds to begin with.

And then it simply just formed all the tiny bits of Play-Doh as you squeeze it and compress it, it merges together into more of a solid as it dries out and extracts the moisture. Press them into mold. You can make any shape that you can dream of. But it's always, it looks like a solid thing at that point.

But it's always curds when it first separates. Fuck me. All right. Let's go. Let's go. So this cheddar-style cheese baking spreads to Ireland, New Zealand, Australia,

North America into the colonies. Cheddar cheese was brought to the colonies just based upon this style of cheese that England got so goddamn good at making. Was there only a certain... Okay, god damn it. How many, okay, do you know how many types of cheddar there are? I mean, that's the thing, is there was cheddar that came over from England.

Okay. And then as soon as it gets here, we just started bastardizing the hell out of it. Okay. Not immediately, it's going to take until after the Civil War before we start playing with anything besides just straight cheddar. But, like, Colby Jack? Yeah. is a Colby cheddar that is mixed with a jack cheese that was just created in Wisconsin. Okay.

Of course it's Wisconsin that creates that. And I believe it was created in a town called Colby. Okay. So you could technically put any type of milk through the chettering process. Yep. And then it would be considered cheddar. Depending on the bacterium that was used to start the coagulation process, yeah. How many different types of bacterium do they do use?

do this? An innumerable amount. So there are special bacteriums that so when you're being a cheese experimenter or a pharmacologist, you are technically trying different milks with different bacteriums all the time to create new types of cheeses. You're going through and figuring out what bacteriums that you can use from researching what came out of that milk or what is good to use in these certain regions and areas. So you're basically reverse engineering from, the cheese what bacteria was used in that region to be able to make it and once you figure those out and that information gets out you can make this cheese anywhere okay and there's cheeses that we're going to talk about that are considered protected uh it's like silk from silkworms stuff like that

yeah except for it's a situation where they're protected within their country okay but again just like anything that makes it the united states we say that's cool it's protected fuck you we're gonna to make it. Yeah. And one of the big things is feta, because feta, I believe we're going to talk about. I'm pretty sure it's made from goat's milk. And it's only able to be made in certain regions in Greece. But we make American feta with cow's milk.

Okay. So Greece says traditional feta can only be made of goat's milk. And in America, we're like, well, we're American. We're going to do what we want. So we're going to make our feta out of cows milk. And there's nothing that you can do about this. Okay. Because technically, it's not the same milk.

It's just, we're calling it same thing. you're calling it. What are you going to do? The true. Yeah. You're going to come over and slaughter all of our cats? No, probably not. The Spanish took Manchego cheese, a hard cheese into the new world. And like I said, before Europeans arrived on American soil in any place, they just never had cheese. The Spanish are so fascinating just with how much destruction they brought to Central and South America, while at the same time you get queso fresco, case of wauaca, all of these different,

just beautiful cheeses that have these single ancestors coming from Spain that had just basically, I mean, it wasn't fired that they brought to them because they had already figured out that. Was the ancestor Manchengo? Or was it then cheese that was made using the milk there that they had from local animals? They brought the Manchego over on the ships. And then once they were over there, they were able to establish that process. But then as Spain was figuring out different cheeses, that intelligence went over there.

And it kind of got a little bit of a spin because, again, like you're saying, different animals, you're going to have different bacterium cultures. Different diets and different heats, different. So it's all going to start changing. 1851, Rome, New York, a man named Jesse Williams, opens the first commercial cheese factory in America. milk producers began to pull the product. 1851 was the first, oh first one. Commercial. Yeah, in America.

Yeah, the large commercial factories. And all these milk producers are pooling the product together to sell in this exploding factory market. Now, there's a problem when you're making cheddar. And I would like to do a little thought experiment here. Okay. I have a cup of yellow cheddar and a cup of white cheddar, and I would like you to close your eyes. Okay. Stick your hand out, and I will hand you one, and then I will hand you the other one, and you tell me which one is yellow and which one is white.

Okay. By taste? Yes. Okay. I'm talking right here, but I'm going to turn to the side, so I'm not eating. What is it, misinophobia or something like that? misophonia, yeah. Misophonia.

So Chris has cheese number one, cheddar number one. Get it in there, get that taste going. Okay. I know which one that is, I'm pretty sure. There's cheddar number two. Okay. First one, yellow, second one white. Pretty good.

Pretty good guess. The only difference between yellow and white cheddar is something called a Nato seed. A Notto seed is a dying agent. that makes cheese that yellow, orange color. And the reason that they did it is because all of these milk producers that were bringing in their milks were, their cows were eating different things. In the wintertime, they were eating hay, whereas in the summertime, they would be out eating grass, and they'd be in different areas where they would be eating different, like, flowers and different things like that. So when the cheese would come out, it would be different colors in different times of the season.

Is that bad or not? And people didn't trust it. So a way that England used an auto was to differentiate different kinds of cheeses by making cheddar just straight yellow. Gotcha. And in the United States, when they're doing it,

they're doing it to try to make a consistent product that nobody will ever guess. So the cheese is the same color regardless of the time of year, whatever it was eating. Uh-huh. Okay. And the only really different variations

with just straight cheddar between white and yellow are going to be the aging process, so the sharpness. I feel like aged white cheddar has a sharp more sharp. And that's when you have sharp cheddar, it's going to be aged, I believe, up to six months. Okay. When you have, I guess it's extra sharp, it's going to be aged at least up to a year. So the sharpness is essentially the time in which it's been aged.

And yeah. Okay. So it's an aging process. While at the same time as it ages, the reason that it starts to change and that it starts to get more, I guess, intense in your mouth is because the change. cheese still has that bacterium inside of it. It's a living organism. And that bacterium is continuously breaking down the lactose and turning it into lactic acid.

Okay. So all of the moisture is being sucked out. And as it's being sucked out, it's just leaving pure flavor. Okay. And this is a great time to talk about all of our lactose intolerant friends and let you guys know that no matter what you believe, as far as what's going to get you, hard cheeses contain so little lactose. that they're not going to blow you up. The older cheeses, the less lactose is in it. So if you're doing like a new cheese or like a fresh cheese, like a mozzarella or something like that, Shittsville.

It's going to be a bad situation. You can eat any kind of hard cheddars, manchegos, Parmigiano Reggiano, anything like that. It's going to have the least amount or even really no lactose in it. Just gives you a reason to eat fancy cheese. The other problem with that, though, is regardless of your talk. Tolerance, if you're intolerant, if you're tolerant, there's always going to be a line of cheese because it's still a dairy product. Well, yeah, I mean, there's a line with everything, right?

It's moderation. Even if you're lactose tolerant, there's always going to be a level of which once you go past, it's going to be bad for you. So regardless of your, everyone's got a cheese tolerance is what you're saying. Despite what my wife thinks, everyone has, yeah. It's a cheese legal limit, basically. Um, post-Civil War, the U.S. begins making more than just cheddar. By 1868 in Wisconsin, they open the first commercial cheese factory for Limburger cheese. Okay. So at this point, it is cheddar being mass produced. There are still artisanal small-scale cheeses that are coming out with different types of cheese. But now we're mass-producing Limburger as well.

Yep. And Limburger is a very stinky washed rind cheese that we have on that board that you've probably been smelling. since we got in here. I don't know if I have or not. We got other stuff in the air in this room. True. I also think it's sat in here long enough that there's a good chance that's just permeated.

We'll get to the Limburger tasting when we start talking about the types of cheese. From there, you have a situation where commercial cheese begins to kill this independent farming market. And at the same time, cheese has always kind of been a matriarchal thing. It was hands.

handled by women that we're out milking the cows and that we're making the cheese. And if you don't believe that cheese is a matriorical thing, go try to milk a male cow and see what kind of cheese you get out of that. It's going to be protein rich, but it's really not going to be good. It's like it's going to curdle real fast. Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be sticky. It's just not going to be great. Don't even touch it with water.

It curdles in water. When you start getting these commercial factories, then it becomes factory work. And then the men take over these processes. Because you're just trying to make a fast product. Yeah, because you're not out there on the farm just milking these cows by hand as much anymore. You don't know these cows' names. Yeah. These are nameless cows, you motherfucker.

It becomes just... They're hardening in this cheese. It's a stranger process at that point. In World War I, for the U.S. side, Americans were told to eat cottage cheese at home because it was the quickest way to make cheese. So they could make large amounts of cottage cheese to be able to. to feed the masses at home. Explain to me cottage cheese, please.

It's a very, it's just the exact same thing where it's a young cheese because as the cheese making process is taking part, depending on how much rent it you use is going to be how much the cheese curd. So if you see like large curd format cottage cheese or small curd, it depends on where you're getting the scoop off of. Gotcha. So a scoop off of the top is going to be a larger curd that's going to still have some, way in it, whereas when you start getting down to the smaller curd, it's going to be towards the bottom because it's lighter and it can't make its way up. And you're still going to be getting something away there.

You're telling me that when you're making cheese in this bucket-o cheese, you have several different products just coming out of this one bucket dependent on where they're scooping this, because you have stuff that they're going to take from the larger curds to then put into some cheddaring to, we're do something like that, put into a mold. Then when they're like, okay, we're getting down to and we're down to the cottage level. And they start like, so it's basically like they're just grabbing a different container and being like, and this one's cottage now. Well, and then again, depending on the bacterium that's used to make it is just going to be a little bit

different style of cheese. It's going to be a little more dull. I forgot to mention out of the four ingredients, salt's always used in just different ways is more of a flavoring agent. And it's also kind of used to continue to draw the way in the liquid. The moisture and everything out. But ultimately, it's mostly. just to flavor the cheese, to bring out the natural flavors to it.

Like when you're stretching mozzarella, you just throw curd in hot, salty water, hot salt water, or hot salt water, and then knead it and start to stretch it and combine those curds together. And as those curds are combining that salt water is infusing inside of that mozzarella, which is why you get a great pole because it's been melted together. But also when you bite into it, you can feel kind of that salty, briny deliciousness. Oh, fuck, man. Get all hot and bother everything. I was going to say, Jesus.

Oh, Lord! Lord, get these cheese demons out of me! Processed cheese was included in military rations in World War I. Craft foods sold millions of pounds of canned cheese to the U.S. Army. During World War II, England outlawed the making of soft cheeses because they had to boost production of these longer-lasting hard cheeses for the troops. They also introduced a single streamlined recipe for something called government cheese. And this was going to be fed to the civilians during extreme food shortages.

From a lot of the kind of interviews that I heard about people over in England that had been eating government cheese, they said a lot of times they've never tasted anything that was similar to that, but it's also a taste that they would just never forget. And it wasn't like a delicious positive taste. It was the taste of survival. Pretty much. World War II, U.S. developed Cougar Gold cheddar. Cougar gold cheddar can be stored indefinitely without going bad.

I don't know how long indefinitely is, but I know that it's too long. Okay, here's my point. Now that I know that cheddaring is just simply the process, now I'm wondering, like, Like, you know when deep frying really just kicked off and people are like, what is it we can deep fry Oreos, Twinkies? And you're just deep frying fucking everything. At some point, do you think they were like, let's just see what we can cheddar? And there was just a string of experiments of trying to chitter different materials. And eventually they chattered this stuff.

They found out it would stay indefinitely. It didn't kill you immediately when you ate it. So they're just like, cool. Cougar gold was it made out of like cougar milk? I don't know. Is that? Yeah, we'll try to milk a fucking Cougar, dude. The military also can, there's a lot of things that we can be thankful that the military has developed.

Not all good. And again, depending on what side of the military, you're like, could be some terrible things that have been developed. One thing I think we can all agree on is their research and development in the powdered cheese technology field that they use to create powdered cheese for field rations. because after World War II, that sprung the invention of Cheetos. So I would assume that in the same way that they have these cheese packets, like when I'm making my kids mac and cheese, which is also he won't eat anything but the Cheeto flavored mac and cheese won't touch the craft shit. No, this had to just be something where tortilla chips,

you sprinkle some of this stuff on some tortilla chips, put a little, mist of oil or something to get them to stick. You just made yourself Doritos with cheese on them. So this had to be just something where someone had some puffy crisps or something. Sprinkle this up and they're like, what are those? It's fucking Cheetos, man.

Yeah, Chester factoring into that feels odd. I'm not sure how Chester shows up in there. We have the counterculture movement to credit for reviving this small farm cheese movement. hipies

hippies moving back to communes that started raising their own animals and creating farms again were the reason why we saw I believe they said that right after the 60s

into the 70s I believe by the 80s the American cheese consumption so like the processed cheese the stuff that was made in the manufacturing craft singles had been cut by like 60% because the artisanal cheese market had come back.

Really? Part of that. Bondue. Okay. You were having all of these different specialized cheeses because you were having these fondue parties where everybody would get together in the sunken living room. You can't be showing up with just cheddar.

No. On a fondue, can you imagine the talk, the amount of shit in neighborhood ladies would talk if you just had cheddar? Yeah. You might be stuck in the front. You might be the front car in the talk. the sex train. You be ostracized.

Yeah, you're going to get ostracized. Yeah, you might be sitting over in the cuck chair. You might have to watch because you were the guy that brought cheddar. Who sit in the cheddar chair? That's what it was before. That's what it was before. Blastless bitch. That's, I guess,

sort of where we can leave the cheese timeline. There's just so much more that we have to get into. As we were talking about, cheese can be made from any animal that produces milk. mainly the cheeses that we get are from cows, goats, sheep, water buffalo, or it's where you, if you ever see buffalo milk, mozzarella. That's the most dangerous milk there is. You can also get it from yaks, camels, donkeys, and moose.

Okay, the water buffalo or moose. I still think water buffalo because that's the thing that kills the most people in Africa, right? Or is it hippos? Hippos. I thought water buffalo. Water buffalo, I think they're more up in Asia, but it could be wrong there. There's going to be some parts of this episode where I just got to say two words, and it's just be cool when we talk about this.

Don't jump to any conclusions. You listeners don't do the same thing. It is very possible and has been done to make human cheese. to use breast milk to curdle it and ferment it and make it fuck did I say that earlier

that cheese is just fermented milk yeah it's a fermentation process okay so I can't really think anything that's more disgusting than human cheese

I mean it stands to reason that then I'm sure there are people that are just like here's the thing like you were talking about I'm not saying I'm a huge proponent of human cheese I can't believe we're even having this conversation. I love the fact we get to have this conversation.

Not a huge proponent of human cheese, but no, if you are a person that is like, well, what if I just make this because I have a bunch of extra like breast milk while I'm raising my kid, and I just make it into cheese, and I just feed this and the kid eats it. Because what's the difference between them just eating it, you know, straight from the tap, drinking it from the boob versus if they need some solids that are going to keep them fuller as they get a little bit older but i don't feel like actual breastfeeding i just want them to still be able to get the nutrients because that's a big thing it's like all the shit that comes within the um colostrum and all that kind of stuff i could see that happening i wouldn't bat an eye at that

but if you're at like the farmer's market and you roll up on you know maggie's you know uh cheese display and she's just got, you know, a huge set of cans and she's like, I make all my own cheese. Might be a little awkward. You got to farm? Nope. Nary an animal. Just these two milkers right here.

Yep. This is Barb and Tammy. Left breast, all this cheese on this side. That's Barb's cheese. Tammy's on this side. I never thought about it. Bars my cheddar gal. I never thought about it from that angle,

but I hate how much sense that it makes it. You just said that as a transition from breast milk to try and get on to solid, food to be able to have breast milk cheese to do that. That's a wild thought. And there's two schools of thought here. And I truly hate both of these people that think this way. Obviously what I'm animal rights advocates love animals. I think they should have all sorts of rights. We get a little bit crazy sometimes with saying, you know, well, if this happens and this happens, would you like it to happen to you? There's a school of thought that people think that

eating human cheese is the closest to cannibalism. It's essentially cannibalism. The counter to that from animal rights groups is saying, you're okay with doing that with an animal. Yeah, because you eat a steak from a cow, too. Yeah, but at the same time, you're okay abusing an animal and strapping suckers onto its udders

and abusing an animal to get the cheese, but you think that that's too much to do to a animal. human being. Mine isn't from an abuse standpoint. I just don't want fucking cheese from a human. Yeah, it's gross. You're allowed to say if something you think is gross, it just sounds gross to me. I don't like mushrooms. Well, some mushrooms are okay. Not old, yeah, okay, yeah. Chocolate bar mushrooms. Fair enough. Different things like that. As we talked about four ingredients, you're going to have milk, bacteria, rennet, and salt, cultures, bacteria, same, same. We have seven, different types of cheeses. And this is just going to be basically from a structure. You're going to have

fresh cheese, which is unaged, it doesn't have a rind on it, high moisture, it's going to be milky, it's meant to be eaten quickly. So these are going to be your mozzarella, anything like that. Cottage cheese fall into this? Okay. Unfortunately, in that scenario, these are going to be the highest lactose cheeses. Okay. I'm not super familiar with mozzarella in the sense of how you're saying, but I have noticed that when you open it, it's wet. If you break it open, there's curd in there, right? That is Barada. That's Barada. Yeah.

Okay. Barada is a nasty trend that the brunch crowd got a hold of, and it became a fad and a fashionable thing to put barada on everything. Okay. And those are the kind of things. Barada's been around for a very long time. And then all of a sudden, white ladies close your ears. White women that love brunch found Barada and took it to a whole other level. And then they ruined barata for everybody?

Maybe not for everybody, but it's one of those things where if you've known about something for a very long time, and nobody is given two shits about it. And then all of a sudden they find out about it. And they're like, oh, my God. This is the band. Yeah. You find a band you like. Uh-huh.

I've been listening to that band for 20 years. I've been thinking about barata for a very long time. So that's going to be your fresh cheese varieties. The next round is going to be the soft ripen cheeses. These are going to be young, creamy cheeses ripen from the outside, resulting in this velvety inner texture. It's also going to have something called a bloomy rind on it, which is a fluffy edible mold that grows on the outside of the cheese. And this is usually something that is created, like a brie. How a brie has kind of that waxy outer ring.

Yeah. That's actually fluffy at one point in time, but in order to try to concentrate it down, because what's happening is the active cultures, the bacteria, the mold that's inside of the cheese needs oxygen. So as the mold is moving to the outside to get oxygen is when you start getting this white fluffiness, you start to pat that down, clean it up a little bit, you're going to end up with that thicker rind on there.

Is this when we get to try that? And now it would be a great time for you to try the brie. It's, I love Brie. It's good with so many different things. Apples and Brie. Yeah, apples and cheese feels so wrong, but at the same time it feels so right. And again, you did it perfectly. You didn't try to soak out the inners.

You ate the rind along with the cheese. And it's delicate, it's soft, it's creamy, it's absolutely delicious. So when it's like a blue cheese like this where it just has the rind on one side, does that mean it was in some type of molding container where it was only allowed to have the mold on the top? It was just maybe a cut out of a different section if it's just on top. Typically blue cheeses, some have rinds, not all of them have to, but yeah, I mean, for the most part, they do. To get away from the soft ripen, you also have a second version that is, I guess, something that people don't tend to like. It's called a, I think I called the bloomy rind, the white rind.

White rind is something separate, so a bloomy rind. It's going to be... Shit. Man, I'm high. Bloomy brie, that's all going to be the same thing. We have another version called a wash rind, and this is something that we can go ahead and thank the monks for, because in all that time that the monks were making their cheese,

they were also making beer, they were making wine, they were making spirits, all these other substances. and they looked at this bloomy rind cheese and they thought we can make this better. We can start to, instead of the mold coming from the outside, we can start attracting mold that want to grow on the surface. We don't want to wait so long. So we're going to use salt water. We're going to use brines made with beer, with wine, all of these different things,

and we're just going to paint the outside of these. And as we paint the outside of these bloomy rinds, they're going to start to turn this kind of oddly red, orange texture or yeah it's oddly red orange sticky kind of texture on the outside of these rinds and the reason that that is is because it encourages the growth of a specific bacteria called a bee linen now a bee linen is also the exact same bacteria that causes stinky feet so the same bacteria that lives on your skin and that can create stinky feet or what is going on with these cheeses. And I mean, I think we're into it. I personally, the only reason that I had ever known about Limburger cheese was strictly through the Three Stooges. It was always a gag and a bit in

the Three Stooges that Curly had Lemberger on him that he had brought for lunch and he stunk for the rest of the time. So Mo whacked him on the head. It stinks. I mean, this is, don't hold on to it for too long because it will stay on your fingers. Give it a good whiff. Smells a lot like feet, throw it down the hatch. I've never had this before. Sorry, listeners. That's not good. I'm not a fan of that.

Nope. Not a fan of that one. Yeah, that's... There's a reason why the name has negative connotations, okay? Yeah, that ain't good, man. That's really bad. It tastes like feet. It does...

It tastes better than it smells, but it doesn't taste good. Not, not much. Wow. You're going to get these savory, pungent flavors. Limburger is what we tried. Savory? It does a little bit of savory to it. Maybe let's clear a palate with a little bit of a drink

because we have another one that we're talking about in this same family called Teleggio. Now, teleggio is Italian. So it's going to be a little bit better. I don't trust anything. If we went straight from cheddar to manufacturing Limburger, what the fuck, man? There are so many other cheeses that you could have gone with.

But think about the people that came over from Europe that inhabit or that I guess went to Wisconsin. Okay. They were all in areas where this is going to happen. So we have Teleggio cheese, which is going to be this one. It's also a washed rine. I

like teleggio a lot. Okay. I'm trusting the teleggio more than the Limburger. The color's better. It's just excuse me, I think a superior cheese. Maybe on the less nasty side is Munster.

What are we? processing. I get nervous with these sticky cheeses. No, that one's good. Yeah. Now, I don't know if it's also the comparison because the last thing I had to say

was Limburger. He went from Dirty Sock to To Leggio. I'm trying to identify what, like, I'm getting out of that. I'm horrible at that, by the way. A little bit more earthy, maybe. Yeah.

Yeah. Less feet. But still, it has those same bee linens on top of it. So it's going to be a, I don't know, I think it's more mild personally to me, but at the same time, there's people that just hate it. I really, I truly cannot blame people for not liking it. So those are young cheeses. No, those are the washed rinds. Wash rinds, okay, gotcha. So the reason

that both of those tastes so much creamier is because the rinds that are on the outside don't allow as much moisture to escape. Gotcha. So the bacteria and the moisture inside of that is working on that lactose so hard that it's turning it into lactic acid. And as all of that goes away, but the moisture is still inside of it, it just almost liquefies it. Gotcha. Okay. So it's holding all of that in, and as it's doing that, instead of drying out and getting hard like you would, like a pecorina or Romano or a hard cheese, it's just all sitting

inside there baking together. Semi-soft cheese, going to be easily sliceable, high moisture. It's going to be a great melt. These are things like Havardi or Fontina cheese. something that's fucking awesome on a sandwich. It's awesome to use to make like a mac and cheese. Just absolutely, some of my favorite cheeses are the semi-soft. I think I'm always still going to sit somewhere around mozzarella.

You're definitely not semi-soft around semi-soft cheeses. No, absolutely not. Before we continue on with the types of cheese list, you go to take a bathroom break? Sure. Cool. Well, hello. Listen, while we had to the restroom and get ourselves something to drink, why don't you do something nice for yourselves?

Head on over to patreon.com slash historically high and get signed up for a little bonus content. I mean, come on, you deserve it. If you want to keep up with this, our main source of social media is going to be our Instagram, which is historically high pod, P-O-D. You can also head over to its Twitter, it's X, it's Twitter, come on, at historically high, and that's high-H-I-like, high.

If you have any recommendations, you want to get to us, just want to reach out and say hello. You can hit us up on our email at historically high podcast, hig-h podcast at gmail.com. All right. And with that said, let's get back to the good stuff. So now we're on to the semi-hard cheese. This is going to be aged for several months. There's going to be less moisture inside of it, denser texture, more buttery and complex flavor. so this is going to be your Goudas,

or is the Dutch call it hauda? Okay, so you're getting more flavor. Like, okay, so we've talked about this before because you always point me toward, like, certain things about food. When you get to, like, fruits and things like that, you don't want a big fruit because it has to spread out its flavor.

It has to do more work to flavor that entire thing. So you get a lot of intense flavors out of, like, smaller oranges, or the smaller bananas, stuff like that. So with cheese, it's not so much the size. It's just being watered down is kind of what it is.

Dryness, yep. The dryness is going to give you the most intense flavor because it's not being diluted by anything else. You're getting just, it's like just eating the shit, the Parmesan.

Parmigiano Reggiano. Yeah, correct. There's no moisture in that and you're getting such an intense flavor. It's just like, yeah, I guess that's what I'm saying is it's just not diluted at all. It's the essence of cheese.

Okay. It's everything that's inside of it. And Gouda is a very interesting cheese because of... In essence, cheese. A young Gouda is going to be far sweeter because it still has the moisture in it. The moisture has the way in it, the way in the lactose or what have the sugars in it. So it's going to come a little bit sweeter. As Gouda ages and it dries out, it's going to become a lot more salty, a lot richer.

And it also can dry to a certain point where the amino acid. acids in the cheese can actually crystallize. So you get these little crunchy bits that as you bite in, it's just straight flavor. It's like a flavor crystal on there. It's like a savory flavor crystal. Gouda's fucking amazing. A gooda gems? Yes, that's what they are.

You have your hard cheeses age for a year or more, dry, crumbly, just intensely savory. As we're eating here, you have Parmigiano Reggiano. You have Manchego. It's going to be from Spain. and we'll talk about kind of the regionality here in a little bit. What's Manchego flavor like? It's going to be pretty similar to Parmesan or Reggiano, except for I believe they use sheep's milk for Manchago.

But I think you could draw similarities between that and kind of some other classic hard cheeses that I can't. It's not coming across right now. I should have gotten some. There were so many options. I froze every single time. No, I got you, man. It was a situation where I thought I want to get this board.

I want to get it as close to the different types of cheese as possible. And then I started looking at shit and I started grabbing stuff. And I looked down into my basket and there were like nine cheeses sitting in there. And I hadn't stopped to get a stinky cheese yet. It was like, well, fuck. What's that one again? That is the teleggio. So that's the stinky Italian.

Not the only stinky Italians we know. A very soft. Blue cheese. Blue cheese is going to be pierced with cultures of penicillium mold. It has distinct blue-green veins, sharp, with a tangy, pungent flavor. These are going to be your Stilton's, which isn't allowed to be manufactured in Stilton. Blue cheese is my favorite taste while I'm stoned. Is it?

Yes. Is that the one? A blue, if I'm high and I can get my hands on a burger with blue cheese on it, just the salty sweetness from the meat and the funer. of the blue cheese. Oh, fuck. Yeah. Talking about semi hard. Blue cheese.

I'm full hard. Blue cheese is kind of a sore subject in our house. Because my wife doesn't like blue cheese, but she likes Gorgonzola cheese. What's the difference? Gorgonzola cheese is blue cheese. It's just Gorgonzola cheese. Really? She told me a million times she didn't like blue cheese.

And then one day we were eating a salad and I looked over as like, hey, you know, it's Gorgonzola, right? She said, yeah, I like Gorgonzola. and I just kind of had to put my head in my hands and really think about the conversation that we were about to have. Is it worth me? Yep. Is it what's going to happen to two possibilities in this situation? I'm going to tell her it's blue cheese, me trying to prove a point and she's no longer going to eat Gorgonzola,

or I'm going to sit here with this knowledge and just continue to have blue cheese in the house. Yeah, I mean, I don't win in this situation. The only way that I win is if I shut the fuck up, we'll give them more Gorgonzola here. Take your medicine. It's very simple. And then you have rogufer cheese. Again, we'll talk about that story

when we get to France and just how incredibly weird it is. Then, again, we have another instance. Be cool. We're going to be cool about this. Process cheese. Made by blending natural cheeses with emulsifiers and other dairy

ingredients to create a smooth, highly meltable product. This is going to be your American cheeses. Your cheese was your velvitas. I will always have a very, very soft spot for American cheese. Not because I think it's the best cheese, because I truly think that my favorite part about cheese can be the melt into something.

And that's exactly what American cheese is built for is not being a star. It's for melting into something else. It's a, it comes in and it's not quite, you know what, it can be. It can be a co-star, but it's never going to. it's not going to be a leading man for sure at all it just doesn't have that ability and it shouldn't it doesn't need to have that ability

in doing this episode and in doing the research we went very different ends of the dinner spectrum here we had a beautiful homemade pizza with pecorino Romano and um

peaches and fucking what do I not remember it um Perciutto. It had a beautiful olive oil, balsamic base in it,

and just a very fine cheese with that Parmesan or Reggiano on it. An old world cheese. And then we also had a chicken chop cheese, which are you familiar with the chop cheese? No. Chop cheese is a New York convention. It's basically

you would take what would be a hamburger patty, you would throw it down on a flat top, you mash that motherfucker up, chop it up, chop it up real nice and fine into beautiful granules, put a little bit of onion in there to melt into it, and then you just starts throwing American cheese on there, and you chop everything together. Just folding it together. Yeah, it's like this beautiful amalgamation of just all of this ground beef.

We use ground chicken because somehow I convince myself that it sounds healthier to eat chicken covered in cheese than that. And then you throw it into a bun, lettuce, tomato. On a traditional chopped cheese, they'll usually hit just a few strings of. of mayo, mustard, and ketchup on there. I do a little bit of barbecue sauce on the chicken chopped cheese. So you're basically just taking the burger and onion aspect of it, and you're making that into a patty,

but everything is infused within it, the onion and the cheese and everything like that. And then you chop everything up into just this almost like taco meat. Yes. That you would have, and then you throw it inside of a bun or a hoagier or anything like that. It's delicious, but you go from having Parmigiano Reggiano, known as some of the,

The royalty of cheeses. Yeah. And then just the working man's American cheese that both provide deliciousness in their own special ways. It's like a Philly. Yeah. It's, you can sit there and you can try to put anything you want on a Philly to try to class it up. But when it all comes down to it, you're with that spoon, you're scooping that whiz out of that jar, melting it into all the, and you know the reason it does that is because that can get everywhere in that sandwich.

It becomes such a liquid that it can literally coat everything, but doesn't have to be cooked together. Sneaks into all the nucks and crannies and just delivers the deliciousness. I mean, it's undeniably just, I don't want to say it because it hurts my heart to say, but it's not cheese. It's a process where you're adding emulsifiers and not just straight milk. You're adding heavy cream. We'll talk about it when we get to the Felveda conundrum. But like I say, we've got to be cool. I can deny that American cheese isn't cheese until the cows come home.

But we are going to run into these processed cheeses, and we are going to talk about vegan cheese. If I'm going to call American Cheese Cheese, unfortunately I have to call Vegan Cheese cheese cheese. Vegan cheese isn't cheese. But you're not calling American Cheese cheese cheese, he said it's not cheese. But in my heart it is. It's something that I know is wrong, but I will fight to the death to be wrong. Because it's part of the cheese family. Yep.

You will fight for its right to be cheese. So Velvita cheese comes about in 1918. It was made by a Swiss immigrant named Emil Frey that was working in the Monroe Cheese Company in New York. And Emil was tasked with trying to figure out what to do with these broken wheels of cheese because as the carts or the trucks would show up, they would load these giant wheels of Swiss onto the back of these trucks, truck them around to all the different buyers,

and undoubtedly because it's cheese, and it isn't always perfect to balance and stack on each other, you would get these big wheels that would break apart. Nobody's going to buy that. It's just not going to be great. So what a meal does is he takes these cheese scraps and any other unsellable cheese that they had, and he starts melting them down.

He adds a salt called sodium citrate. The sodium citrate prevents the melted cheese from separating, and we get the birth of velvita cheese that's then pushed out into these blocks. Fucking pooped out into them. It is made from real cheese, though. It's made from these scraps of Swiss cheese, this Amintal cheese that, again... So it's the plywood of cheese? Kind of.

Yeah, that's actually not a bad way to look at it. unfortunately, a meal's product in Velveeta Hmm It's a staple in every college house One for plain beer pong on One for making mac and cheese They're doing something

Yeah So that was a meal's recipe Mealser was going to be Amulsifier in the sodium citrate Mixed with all this unsellable cheese When it gets to that melting point It's going to be piped off Into these

rectangles of what is I guess just basically real cheese at that point in time. Velvita's base ingredients at that point were the cheese and then the sodium citrate. And then all of a sudden, craft foods acquires Velvita and Monroe cheese in 1927, and they bastardize this product. So to go from those few products or those few ingredients in the original Velvita, Velvita now is made with skim milk, milk, canola oil, milk protein concentrate, sodium fosite, sodium

phosphate, modified food starch, way protein concentrate, maltodextrin, whey, calcium phosphate, lactic acid, sorbic acid, of course, is a preservative. Milk fat, sodium alginate, sodium citrate, enzymes, epocartanol, and an auto for the coloring, of course. Cheese culture and vitamin A, vitamin A, palomate. So from two ingredients to... roughly 20? Yeah. Yeah, just very, very quickly it changes. And Velvita, I mean, it just sucked. I don't remember. For each additional ingredient, you're just lowering the percentage of the actual

cheese that you have to, and you're stretching that act out even more, but while still being able to call it cheese. And that's just one of those things where Velvita. He's dishonesty. Velvita started it as such a pure fix. And then Kraft gets a hold of it. It was like, watch this shit. We're going to stretch this out. We're going to step on this product and we're going to turn this crack or this cocaine into crack and everybody's going to need it. American cheese, this is maybe another sensor. This is the basketball story of food because in 1911 Swiss alchemists and cheese makers,

Walter Gerber and Fritz Settler or Stettler of Thune, Switzerland invented processed cheese. They developed his first shelf stable processed cheese by heating shredding. an emmental cheese, much like a meal did, just earlier. They added sodium citrate themselves, and boom, we get the first American cheese that is highly meltable, very shelf stable, never going to be intensely flavorful, but it's going to work that same way. Question. Was this invented in America?

Nope. This was in Switzerland. Okay. Why is it American cheese? And is it because there was already a Swiss cheese? No. Again, Swiss cheese is something that we... We give to kind of one cheese that has holes in it, but the Swiss make like 400 varieties of cheese.

Gotcha. Okay. The Kraft patent for American cheese doesn't come until 1916, so we're five years behind these Swiss guys. Unfortunately, Swiss patents don't cover the United States. So Kraft goes ahead and gets his hand on this patent. He follows a very similar idea, shockingly similar idea, using these melting salts to amulsify mostly. Cheddar and Colby Jack is going to be his blend. So his Amintaller, his Swiss cheese, isn't going to be what he uses. He's going to use mostly cheddar and Colby Jack and whatever he can get his hands on.

Now, much like I was talking about the basketball story, craft that invents Kraft American cheese, Canadian. So we have a Canadian that invented American or invented America. And patent it. I don't know if they do it up in Canada the same way. I feel like they'd have to have Canadian cheese. No, I think if you just. What if it's the first? And there's no other American cheese before there.

Before that. Yeah. I mean, they did call a lot of the slop that was coming out of America, just American cheese before this happened. So American cheese took on a meeting. And then they took the sloppest of it all and turned that into the staple of American cheese. Pretty much. 1935, Kraft Brother Norman Craft creates Kraft American slices.

Now, how he does this is they, create the slurry that is American cheese and instead of making them in blocks and slicing them, they went ahead and had this giant cooled steel table. They pour the cheese onto it, it flattens out completely equal. They take a dye cutter, they drop it on there. So craft American singles aren't just slices off of a cheese block. It's one big cheese blanket sheet that is then cut into these individual slices. I always figured it would have come off of a block. That's exactly what I thought you were going to say.

They took one of the blocks. They still made it and instead they just fed it through a slicer. There's one big giant craft single that gets turned into like 300 slices. It's absolutely wild. We'd have to wait until 1916 before individually wrapped singles were invented by

craft. They were invented by pumping a plastic tube just full of American cheese as it was hot and then flattening that cheese and having just a guillotine slicer come through and hit that and seal it up. So if we wanted to talk about microplastics in our bodies now through all the shit that we do, these guys were using a guillotine chopper to chop plastic down. Putting it in hot.

Hot plastic and hot cheese cooling together. Yeah, it's a good chance that's probably where micropastics start. Oh yeah, because there was so much concern about the makeup of those plastics back in 1916, right? Yeah. Yep. I don't even know if we had gotten to the bad step of a. inventing asbestos yet. Yeah, 1916.

Now, on to it. Vegan cheese. Vegan cheese history goes back far further than I had ever thought. 16th century, fermented tofu slices in China were considered the first vegan cheese. By the late 1800s, John Harvey Kelly creates a nut-based product called nuttos. It was a dairy-free cream cheese substitute. By the 1980s, you get the first blended place. plant-based ingredients using cashews, soy, potatoes.

They would combine them with fats and most fires like coconut oil. They would use acids in there like lemon juice to create these curds. They would add thickeners like tapioca starch that start to give it a little bit more texture and meltability as it gets to that point. It doesn't sound bad. None of those ingredients sound bad to me. I can fuck with any of those ingredients. All those things are great.

I can't call it cheese because it just doesn't have milk in it. Yeah. I'm not going to fight you to the death. If you're not going to call it nut cheese. Yeah. If we can have breast. Makes it sound even more in a feeling. That just sounds like we're back to the human cheese dilemma at that point.

Breast cheese and nut cheese are two cheeses that I just don't want to have. And I'm not saying they're bad. Vegan cheese. I've had some vegan cheeses that's good, but it's just not the same thing. And it never will be the same thing. If I had never had cheese before and I had vegan cheese, I guess, just can be fucking cheese. But unfortunately, I've had.

A lot of cheese I've had some of the best fucking cheese. Yeah. All right. Now we're to it. The Swiss whole panache. Okay. So Emmentaler cheese is the cheese

that's most notably associated with this in the United States. You're going to have other cheeses like Havardi that have holes in them, but Ementoller cheese holes are known as eyes. So the cheese that is traditionally known as Swiss cheese with the always see in the triangular slice with the holes

and everything like that. Sometimes you see it as white. sometimes you see it as yellow. That's due to the coloring. It's the emojis. It's everywhere. I mean, that's when you think of cheese and you think of the picture, every mouse that's ever had cheese in a cartoon is going to have holes.

You take a look at a cheese head hat from Wisconsin for Green Bay. Does that have holes? It does. It does. So in the early 2000s, Ementhaler cheese started to lose its holes. It started to lose its eyes. And nobody knew what this was.

Nobody could understand why this emmental cheese was losing its size. That's what these holes were called. They're varying degrees as far as how big these holes can get. And as they're going through and they're trying to study this, they discovered that these eyes of cheese, they already knew this part of it. They're created because there are pockets of carbon dioxide gases that get caught up in the fermentation process. And that's what leaves those voids in there is once the cheese is cut and that carbon dioxide. side leaves, there's still these hollow caverns inside of it. Or they remain in there long enough for the cheese to harden enough to maintain a shape.

And the longer that it dries, the bigger the holes are going to be. So like if you've ever seen a young... As it dries, it's going to keep pulling away. If you've ever seen like a young Swiss, there's going to be a lot of very, very small holes in it. When you see a more mature Swiss, you're going to see the bigger eyes. Okay. So they figured out what happened here was the reason the eyes were going away is because

During the milking process, it was becoming more mechanized and more clean. Previous to this, when you just are milking a cow in a barn, you're going to have little flex, little hay powder that's going to get in the cheese. And that little bit of hay powder during the fermentation process, it's going to create a void. When that void's created, that little microscopic void is created, that carbon dioxide gas is going to find those little void. that's what's going to blow them up into huge spots. So in order to put the eyes back in the Emmentaler cheese, they agreed that it was okay to use hayflower in the mixtures that were going to be fermented to create the voids for that carbon dioxide to get in and grow again.

So what caused something that became a signature of that was an imperfection within the process, and by them trying to perfect the process too much, it was losing the identity of what that cheese had already built up. Yeah, the most iconic identifier was going away because the process got more sterile. And in people's minds, the cheese could have tasted very similar, but if those holes aren't there, technically that ain't Swiss cheese, right? Yeah, what are you eating if there's no holes in it?

That's not Swiss cheese. What is that mouse? Cartoon Mouse supposed to be, no, cartoon mouse don't eat that. It has no holes in it. That's not the kind of cheese you like. That's right. I've seen all these Tom and Jerry episodes. You don't eat that kind of stuff. So today, there's more than 2,000 distinct cheeses in the world.

Just every continent except for Antarctica, anywhere that there's something that has milk that can be milked, will eventually private energy. And new stuff is being created because people that haven't combined different bacterias with different cheeses or different types of milk, those permeations haven't been done yet, or not in this, you know, exact same amounts. They're blending new different kinds of enzymes.

They're putting these enzymes into different kinds of cheese. The very cool thing that I don't know if I've ever had it, but I would really be curious to try as blended milk cheeses. So milk from a cow and milk from a goat blended together to make a cheese. Oh, okay. You're getting all of these different flavor profiles from the way that the milk is made inside of the animal. They're all going to taste a little bit different a certain way. So if you can have a half milk cheese, half goat cheese or half cowl cheese,

or half cow milk, half goat milk, and put it together, you're going to have a cheese that's going to taste completely different from both of those. But that could also be the fact that, and it could also be different if you had a cow from the highlands of Scotland and a goat from somewhere in France, and then you did that. Again, it's both a goat and a cow, so it's different than both of them by themselves. But then the diet and the way the cheese is like, so there could be an infinite possibility of just different regional mixtures of cheese and everything. The French have this belief in something,

and they use this all the time. It sounds very pretentious when you talk about it, because they talk about a wine too, but it's called Tua. Or Tewa. It's basically the terrain. So they always infer that you can make any cheese on any continent in the world,

but it's never going to taste the same as the original place that it's from because of the terrain that it was on, because of the things that it was eating. You can use the exact same bacterium enzyme on cheese from France over in America, use the exact same milk. You can make the exact same product,

but there's always going to be a slight difference because the cow that you have over there wasn't eating the alpine grasses from France. The terrain causes so much the temperature, the way that the milk is processed. You have certain situations in history where there have been, are black and white spotted cows?

More of the cows that they had back then. Yeah. They have made genetic, or I guess they didn't hybridize. They bred the way the spotted cows are now because they could breed them in a way to where their milk efficiency was so high. Those are jerseys or guerns or something like that. Jersey cows, I believe, yeah. They can get that kind of stuff out of. There was a, it was some kind of like a black goat that had produced, or that was producing less milk on average.

And it was just a genetic anomaly for every 10 white goats that you would get. there would be one black goat. It didn't produce as much milk. So it was starting to be weeded out of the genetic pool. They weren't breeding them because they weren't good for what they were using them for until you get this cheese market that comes back to artisanal cheeses because while it doesn't produce as much milk, it has a richness in its milk just genetically that the white goats didn't have.

So you have artisanal cheese saving breeds of goats. just because their milk can be made into something that's different. Just like you're saying, like, the smaller concentration, different flavors, things like that. Depending on cream levels of the milk, just all sorts of different factors. So kind of around the world, we're going to hit the high notes of these places, because again, more than 2,000 distinct kinds of cheeses. We're not getting anywhere close. England.

Cheddar, as we talked about, from a village in cheddar in summer. Stilton English blue cheese is made from cows, milk and it must be made in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, or Leicestershire. Stilton is a town that this cheese originated from. And it cannot legally be made in Stilton because it is under something called a PDO protected designation origin status. And that means that once it was made in Stilton, these factories that were in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire,

they would basically export the cheese making to these larger facilities. None of it was made in Stilton. When it got this protected status, those were the only three towns that it was being made in, so those are the only three towns that it could be made in.

Gotcha. Now, I think we know of another peto protected status over in England in former Prince Andrew, but you can't, Stilton's incredible. It's a wonderful blue cheese.

France, Brie, soft cows milk cheese as we talked about known as the queen of cheeses with this beautiful white, bloomy rind. Some French styles

carry this same PDO status. Brie de Mall, the one that we talked about that Charlemagne loved was the first cheese to get the AOP, which is their distinct

French status in 1980. Since it gets this AOP, piece status, this means that all of the methods of creating this cheese have to be followed to a T for it to be considered this Brees de Mall. Of course, it's going to fetch a much higher price tag because it can only come from certain areas. They say that you can be arrested if you're making it anywhere else, which is absolutely insane. Camember cheese was originally from Normandy, France, and it's very similar to Bri, but it has a washed rind mostly now. During World World War I, French soldiers, this was a staple in their rations.

It's a softer cheese. A softer cheese. Because that was something that the French military believed would be enough to remind them of home in the better times. Because they have hard cheeses in France, but why not give them something that's a little harder to make and maybe cost a little bit more and is a little bit more perishable? Well, and it's because they could get it out to them much quicker. Yeah. It wasn't them waiting for a hard cheese in its time frame. It was like, we can get them out without having to let it age.

And we can make them feel better. Yeah. About the shitty situation through it. And everything is hard and still that they're having. This is something that, yeah, is purposely soft. Got to do it that way. Roquefort cheese. Sharp tangy, aged in limestone caves, sheep's milk made.

That's what it, one of the things that's aged in limestone caves. Yep. So the story of how Rokeford came. to be was two different stories, pretty much the same thing. There was a young shepherd boy that had stopped inside of this cave to take a break to eat his lunch during the day. He had a lunch of cheese and bread, cheese and rye bread. As he's out scanning the horizon, depending on which myth you believe in, he either sees

a hot-ass farm girl walking by, or he sees a band of marauders that are looking at his flag. A band of bargains. So he throws down his cheese. and his rye bread inside the cave and takes off either after the women or to hide from the bandits and supposedly returns a few days later to find that his rye bread had this green mold on it that had transferred over to his cheese. He must have been very desperately hungry that day and he went ahead and ate the cheese with the

green mold on it and this is the birth of blue cheese. Now, lots wrong with that story considering that, uh, It usually takes about three months for the mold to grow. But at the same time, this rye mold is what's responsible for the mold. It was a specific mold that only formed on rye bread. Yep. And that's what gets transferred over to Rokeford. So somehow this happened.

I'm not exactly sure how it happened. If I was a betting man, I would say that these cheeses were more inoculated as far as sticking a needle in the side of it or something. like that and plunging this penicillium in it to basically start that growth. And the reason that it fractures off, I believe, is probably because you're sticking a bigger needle into it. It's going to fracture a little bit as it's drying out. And that penicillium is just going to spread throughout it. Blue cheese, again, I'm a huge fan.

Absolutely love it myself. It's so fucking funky. But Roqueford itself has its own penicillium, Rogue 40, Rye mold that's just specific. to that Rokeford cheese. So basically, is that something to where they just constantly have a supply of of rye bread that is molding to continue to get that cheese for product or that stuff for production? There's certain ways now to where they can recreate it in a lab, like rent it that you used

to be able to get out of an animal stomach. Yeah. You can also find rennet in stuff like artichokes. Okay. You can also, they figured out how to lab engineer it now. Gotcha. you're basically, you can produce it. They can produce these kinds of molds

pretty much anywhere without the rye, but you can always just use rye mold to do that. All the other cheeses that are blue cheese are going to have similar form of penicillium, but Roque for cheese is the only one to have this Roque 40 penicillium in it. On to Italy, Pomagiano Reggiano. Hard, crumbly, nutty cheese

only from the Amelia Romagna region in Italy. This has this protected status as PDO status on it. It has to be aged for at least 36 months. So you're going to be talking about a cheese. It's aged three years before it can hit your lips. Such a long aging process, there's places in Italy that are cheese banks. So you will make your wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano.

You will take it to a cheese bank. you're going to get paid out for that wheel. They're going to store it for 36 months. They're going to sell it to make a profit because now it's good. The reason why this is great, though, is because these cheese producers don't have to wait 36 months to pay their workers or to get paid for this. Yeah.

So you just have these large warehouses, basically. Completely climate controlled to ensure that these things are drawing out the right amount of moisture and everything. It's packed full of Parmesan-Reggiano. Oh, yeah, just to get back with Roquefort, anything that says cave age now a cave can be any environment that has a door on it and it can be

climate controlled and temperature controlled and humidity controlled. So now when you see cave age it's beautiful to think that all these cheeses that say cave age were pulled out of caves and you could eat them. The reason why caves are so perfect is because they don't always get

too hot, they don't get too cold, they can maintain a normal temperature and they always maintain that humidity that's perfect for that growth. So if you see cave age now. Do whatever you want with your imagination, but there's a great chance it comes out of a warehouse. This is a lovely cave age.

Yeah, it's kind of controlled. Linderger. Along with Parmesan or Reggiano, that's made from cows' milk. You have mozzarella, which is a soft cheese from the Campania region. It's made from water buffalo milk traditionally. If you want a traditional Neapolitan pizza,

it can't be considered a traditional Neapolitan pizza without buffalo's milk, mozzarella put on it. So it has to be that same thing just to make what would be considered an accurate representation of a Neapolitan pizza.

Who the fuck cares? But at the same time, there's also a little something like when you eat one and they can say, yeah, no, these are certified San Marzano tomatoes. This is certified.

It's kind of like, okay, well, this has been eaten this way for hundreds of years. Yeah. It's one of, of my absolute favorites. You have Gorgonzola too, as we just talked about.

It's one of the oldest blue cheeses in the world. And this one's known for more of a distinct green vein. It's also made from cows milk. Again, just another fantastic blue cheese. We're going to move off to Switzerland. Emintal cheese that we were talking about, mild, nutty, slightly sweet. Holy, of course. It's a semi-hard cows milk cheese.

Maybe a top five cheese for me with this. Grier cheese. Dense, melty, slightly salty. It's produced only in summer from the Alps. This is another PDO protected

cheese. It can only be produced in summer. It can only be produced in the Alps of Switzerland. Greer... Wait, so if something has the name Greer on it,

it is from that, there, under those circumstances. How expensive is Greer? Unless it's American-made. Okay. Can we bastardize it? Just like all these other PDO protected things, we have come to bastardize them. And I don't hate it because if you can get something very similar to it, I've had Greer that was PDO.

It's fucking awesome. It's absolutely incredible. I've had American Greer. Still good. There's a Greer cheddar mix that you can get from T.Js that's so, so tasty. So nice. But yeah, the reason why Greer has to be that way. that it's PDO protected is because you get these

cows up in the Alps that are eating these grasses in the summertime that are just beautifully flavoring the milk products that are going to come out of these cows. You can only get it in certain areas and it's just up in the Alps. Grease, you have feta. It's that crumbly brine-cured soft cheese that's fucking awesome in salads. It can be made from sheep or goat's milk. Unfortunately, here in the United States,

United States, we go ahead and make feta out of cows milk because that's how we do it. It's from certain protected regions in Greece that those are the only places that you can call it feta cheese. One that I just threw in there because it's, again, this isn't a cheese powerhouse, but Cyprus. Cyprus is where you get Hulumi cheese. You're familiar with Hulumi cheese? It's that very, very dense cheese that you can set in a pan and it'll brown up on both sides, but it'll never melt.

Hmm. That's not the type of cheese they make bread cheese out of, is it? I believe. I mean, I don't think it's exactly Hulumi, but it's, yeah, the same idea. Or gets crispy on the outside and then you buy those from TJs all the time. Chewy. Yeah. So Hulumi cheese, it doesn't make any sense because you think if you put heat to it, it would eventually melt.

Yeah. It cooks. Yeah. In the process, the reason that it cooks that way is because the process of making Hulumi, they take these curds and they simmer them in hot way for about an hour, hour and a half. And as that's happening, all of the milk proteins in the curds that are being cooked in the hot water. Because normally you're going to simmer, I guess not simmer, but you're going to cook milk in a warmer vat. But once you separate it out, everything's going to get separated.

They leave it inside that way. And as that's cooking, all of these milk proteins are starting to retract. They're binding super tightly. It's going to be super duper dense, and there's a very low conversion of lactose to lactic acid because it's going to be so wet in the cooking process it's going to trap it inside the curds. Gotcha. These strong structures are the reason that it can hold together so well and be cooked, and it can be crispy on the outside, but it's still spongy and soft on the inside.

Spain, as we talked about, Manchego cheese, it's a hard sheep's milk cheese, only from the La Mancha region. It's going to have a very nasty or zesty nutty flavor to it. Manchego's also a very fine cheese to be grated over pasta I like, which seems sacrilegious to grad it over an Italian thing, but it's still good. You're a student of no singular culture. No. No, I'm an eater of the world.

The Netherlands. Gouda, Gouda, howda, if you want to be Dutch about this. It's a creamy yellow cow's milk from cheese. that ages to develop this kind of caramel-like taste. You're going to have sweetness early on as it ages further and further along. You're going to see this kind of richness come out of it where the sweetness goes away a little bit. As we were talking about earlier, this is where you get these little gems of amino acids that crystallize for a crunch. It's just so fucking awesome.

That's kind of our little tour for now. again, I'm sure if you guys like this episode, we can go into plenty more cheeses, plenty more places around the world. But we've got to get to some important stuff. We've got to get to cheese battles. Battles for cheese. The Alkmar cheese

war of the late 1500s in this wealthy Dutch city of Alkma saw two rival cheese guilds that fought for exclusive rights to sell in the market square. The city market square was up for grabs. Of course, it starts out the way that anything starts with these verbal arguments where they're yelling at each other and they're saying, hey, you get off my street.

This is my area. This is my turf. Fuck your cheese. No, fuck your cheese. We're having a cheese turf war that's going on over there. And like these things do, it escalates into vandalism. And then once it escalates into vandalism, you start getting these street fights. It all culminates in guild members entering the square from opposite sides. using the wooden sticks that they use to carry cheese around to just beat each other mercilessly.

They are setting up a jousting style events, not events, but this is how you settle for cheese supremacy. So they're lining their carts up and they're ramming each other to see either who's playing chicken or who's playing for keeps at this point. The throwing wheels of Adam cheese at each other, knocking each other out. Fortunately, at this point, no one was killed. You had the city officials that have to sign a legitimate peace treaty. A cheese treaty. A cheese treaty. A cheese treaty that divides the square and half between these two guilds.

And the best part about it is, is in this Alkmaar region, this Alkmaar city, there was like six cheese guilds. And there was only two guilds that were going at each other. So you had the Alkmaar region. four cheese guilds that are seeing what's going on. Like, fuck this. Yeah, what the fuck, guys? We're all supposed to be happy. This is the Netherlands.

We're making cheese. Could you think of a better future? Oh, this has been a long time coming. Just be cool. Everybody just fucking be cool. This is a real Romeo and Juliet type cheese situation where maybe the kids had something going on. The families had some beef.

Big beef and cheddar. Two star-crossed cheese making lovers that come together. We're trying to combine their, their loves to create a new cheese. October 2nd, 1766 during Nottingham's Goose Fair. Don't know what the fuck a goose fair is. I'd check it out. Nottingham knows how to get down.

Pretty interesting. This is where the, I guess the scene, the setting for the Great Cheese Riot of 1766. Now, just like we talk about World War I, the only reason that World War I is called World War I and not the Great Wars because we had World War II. Correct. The Great Cheese Riot of 1766, by putting 1766, and it makes me think there was more than one cheese riot. Correct.

It could have started that as a Great Cheese Riot in 1766, and then maybe in 1780 there was a second Great Cheese Riot, so they had to throw... And even greater cheese riots. The numbers behind it. There was a poor harvest that year. There were skyrocketing food prices. and a revolt ended up starting when these merchants started buying up all of the available cheese to export them out of the country to make more money. Cheese cost doubled in a single week. Pricing locals out of the market, they're not able to eat any of the cheeses.

And again, it's the reason cheese is so important, I don't think I said it earlier, it's basically like giving a longevity pill to milk. It's trying to make milk mortal to be able to get all of those necessary fats and vitamins and everything like that. And you couldn't be just killing your livestock. It wasn't just like, oh, we need meat or protein or anything like that. This was a continually providing, you know, renewable source of that kind of stuff. And if you could stretch an already valuable thing out even more, it made it even more valuable. And then you have these merchants that are buying it up to sell it somewhere else. and clean up the market.

So locals had enough of that shit. They began looting stands. They were rolling large wheels of cheese down the street. And as the mayor came out to try to figure out what was going on in the madness, he got swept off of his feet with a rogue cheese wheel that busted up his knee pretty bad. Is there a reason that that was like the go-to shape was just a large wheel? I think it was ease. Okay.

Because if you're trying to move them and they're in 90, pound wheels. But what was the mold made of? Because making a wheel mold seems harder than a square. You see in like the spring cake mold? It's

they used them basically. They would wrap them around them. They'd pack the curds in. Then they'd punch them down. And I think they did it just strictly because you could get more with that shape on the outside of it. And then as you're moving them, you're able to roll them. Yeah. They're stacking and trout.

Yeah. A lot more. stackable. And I'm sure it's also too, because if you have a bunch of squared off rolls and you're trying to pull them down. It's also the shape too because it would also all, when it was ready, all of it was ready. Because if it was drying out, if it's dried out here, it's all

equal distance from the center where as a square is going to be differently. Corners could be different. You're going to get drier faster, for sure. So, after the mayor gets his legs taken out from Hunter and by a rogue cheese wheel, he goes ahead and calls in the police. The police show up. They start

arresting some of these looters and because they couldn't really leave the scene, they just took over a coffee house and locked all of these looters inside of the coffee house. And then the mob heard about the coffee house prison. And the mob went ahead and busted into the coffee house prison and got the rest of the looters out. And shit just went nuts for a number of days. The troops were ended up, they ended up being called in to try to squash this riot. soldiers fired into a crowd, as they tend to do, and ended up only killing one person.

They wounded quite a few of them, but they only ended up killing one person. Unfortunately, that one person was a local farmer that was just trying to protect his own cheese. So, the guy that got killed ended up getting his cheese looted after successfully fighting off and trying to save his own supply. The violence would continue for days. it got bad enough that cheese wagons were formed into convoys and they were given armed escorts to move them around the cities they were trying to sell them and to get out to the ports

to ship them off. Delicious gold. Yeah, truly was. Just a lot of fighting and a lot of violence over cheese. Then there's just a fun story that I had to throw in because it's like, yeah, of course these people were around each other. So during the Great Fire of London in 1666, there was a diarist his name's Samuel Pepys.

I don't know if a diarist is like a novelist or a journalist. Not really sure what a diarist is, but Samuel Peep's, very famous guy, very rich guy. During the fire, as it was coming towards his house, he became concerned. He sent off a bunch of his diaries and wine out to his summer house. But the problem was, was he had this giant wheel of Parmesan cheese that they said was basically worth its weight and gold. And there was no way that Samuel Pepes was going to be able to get it out of the house and get it to a summer house fast enough

before the fire approached. So he enlisted his friend, William Penn, to go out into the garden and to dig a hole and to bury this giant wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano, covered it up in the dirt. The man that he got to help him dig this hole and bury his wheel of cheese is the same guy that founded Pennsylvania.

Yeah. leave me now what the fuck man this guy goes from digging holes for wheels of cheese that came from Italy in England during a fire to just founding Pennsylvania I truly don't understand how

these two things connect peeps came back after the fire I'm sure he unburied the cheese I'd be pretty curious to know how close the fire got and how hot it got and just what it did to the flavoring of the cheese. But being out of the dirt, maybe it didn't do a lot. I bet it was a lot earthier, probably when it got done.

I don't know what payment, Penn got out of the deal. Maybe he got a slice lopped off. I was going to say it was probably, you know, a steak in the giant wheel of cheese. He got to, he cornered the market. The heist, the cheese heist. You got to love a good heist. You can't beat a heist. You like heist?

You like cheese? Cheese heist. Perfect. 2015, the Italian Parmesan Reggiano ring gets arrested. These police arrests this organized crime ring that had stolen over 2,000 wheels of authentic Parmesan from warehouses over a two-year period in Medina, Italy. The take was estimated to be over a million dollars. 2015. We're not talking about 1949. No.

We're not talking about 1917. We're talking about 11 years ago. There was a Parmesan cheese theft ring. 2,000 wheels. That's a lot of wheels. And the fact that it's just like, there were places all over this, you know, over a two-year period that they were just like 2,000 wheels. Yeah. Where are you storing it?

Where are you moving it off to? Where's the market to sell black market? The black, the cheese black market sounds like a very dangerous black market. The fact that. That's estimated over a million dollars for 2,000 wheels of cheese. I mean, that's a lot of cheese. That's a lot, but a million bucks worth of cheese is nuts. In 2016, there was a semi-truck that was carrying roughly 70,000 pounds of cheese

that was stolen from a facility in Germantown, Wisconsin. It was going to be Wisconsin. Yeah, it was backed up to the loading dock and had just been loaded, and this group broke in. They ended up stealing the truck and pulling away of 70,000 pounds of cheese. They'd be found the next night, 20 miles away in Milwaukee, trying to sell this hall of cheese for a buck a pound. And of course, the buyers of the cheese got suspicious

why they were trying to unload this for so cheap. Oh, shit. This is the incredible... Well, so cheap, it's still people trying to sell a truckloaded cheese for 70,000. Like, who's going to be lining up to buy that? This is the incredible part about Wisconsin is they are. I mean, there are cheeseheads. Uh-huh.

They're... they produce more cheese in the United States than any other state. Their marketing campaign is so solid that the Wisconsin cheese conglomerate, the corporations there, for every pound of cheese that sold, $1 from those sales goes back into marketing. They spend a buck a pound back into their marketing campaigns just to promote Wisconsin cheese.

They make great cheese. They make awesome cheese. but to put that much effort and that much financial stake into marketing Wisconsin cheese, that's... They're also known as the cheese state, though, so it obviously has worked, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's a reason why they are that way, and A, it's because they make so much cheese, but P, it's because it's awesome. It's absolutely incredible. The whole was worth 160,000 bucks, so they were shorting themselves $90,000. You just got to unload the cheese at that point.

Yeah. It's before it melts. You're trying to move off of it pretty quickly. In 2024, there were men that posed as legitimate wholesale cheese distributors from a major French retailer that had tricked this London dairy into handing them over 22 metric tons, 950 wheels of cloth-bound cheddar cheese that was valued at $390,000. So they posed as this, these wholesale distributors who had a, another storage facility in England. We have arrived for each other.

And for some reason, this cheese company, they had just agreed to move this cheese into this facility and not take payment before it happened. So valued at almost $400,000. So this place was called Neal's Yard Deli. Or Neal's Yard Dairy. Not deli. That would be Chinese Dairy.

A lot of cheese at a deli, though. Yeah, true. So they move these 950 wheels of cheese into this storage facility that these supposed French retailers had been renting out. And when they came time to come get their payment, they show up and this warehouse is completely empty. It's all gone. They had never been paid for it. And the problem with this dairy was they had, they were purchased. serves from all of these regional farms

that they were getting all of this from. Well, they paid all of their farms out already for the amount of cheese that they had purchased. So they were left holding the bill at $390,000 for no cheese. There'd be a total of six men. It's a lot of cheddar. That is a lot of cheddar. There you go.

There's another one. These six guys were arrested in connection. Cheese was never found. They believed that it was shipped out of England and that it was probably traded and sold away on the international cheese scandal. Yeah, in Russia and all of these other places where nobody's ever going to say anything. Yeah. But it was pretty interesting the way that it happened because there were chefs like Jamie Oliver,

guys that are very, very big in England that were putting out these PSAs that were basically saying, if you see a deal for this. You see something. Say something. That was the campaign that they were putting out to try to get this back. And again, credit to the dairy, they had already paid all of their farms and everything for this cheese. They'd never come back and said, hey, we got robbed of this cheese. We need this money.

They understood that for them taking the hit to be able to keep those producers in business was going to be better for their business. We talked a little bit earlier about some of these stinky cheeses and maybe the king of the stinky cheese. this stuff is truly nasty and just based upon the Limburger that we ate this cheese is called Espose. And Espoise is this French cheese that's so pungent. It's made in Burgundy. And again, it's another very soft cheese with a washed rind. They actually wash it with Mach de Bourgion,

which is this local brandy during the aging process, and it gives it the super duper reddish rind. it smells so bad that they've outlawed it on French trains and on transit because the smell is so overwhelming because it's so offensive to the French yeah yeah people that aren't exactly known for smelling awesome are like hey this cheese stinks so bad we can't take this again we'd be speaking still we'd still be talking like this

if it wasn't for them so thanks France thanks fellas you can keep some of your super stinky cheese. Yes. This is, they say that it's an urban legend, I don't truly know, but at the same time to think that a cheese is outlawed because of its funk. I mean, you don't cook fucking broccoli or fish in the microwave in the

break room. There's rules. You don't take an egg salad sandwich on an airplane. You got it. There's just, there's rules. Anything egg related does not go on a planet. No, no, there's rules in society that don't have to be said, and one of them is keeping this as supposed to cheese away. I don't know how gross you

want to get, but I got a problem with the Sardinians. The Sardinians are, I don't know if they're nasty people. I'm sure they're very nice people, but what they do with cheese is fucking disgusting. So there's this stuff called Kassu Marzu. And for all intents and purposes, it is not recommended to be eaten. It's this traditional Sardinian cheese or sheep's milk cheese.

And it's intentionally infested with live maggots known is cheese flies. And as these maggots hatch, they begin to eat down into the cheese. And you are supposed to eat these cheese with the maggots still alive inside of it. Now, they say that this is the most dangerous cheese in the world because if these maggots are

messed with, they begin jumping. They can jump like six inches into the air. and if you eat this cheese with the live maggots inside of it, if it survives your teeth, it can also survive your stomach acid, and it can cause different side effects like parasites, bloody diarrhea. The fuck.

Yeah. It's illegal. It's illegal pretty much everywhere. It's even illegal in Sardinia, but there's this illegal black market of very adventurous eaters that want to eat this stuff. It's not pretty. I wouldn't recommend looking at a picture.

No, I'm not. It's pretty nasty. But at the same time, it's also just fascinating that somebody would want to try that. Like, that's... But at the same time, that has to be created out of a sense of survival, like survival, of necessity. And then it just became a traditional thing. And then maybe it became one of those things where it's like, you got the balls to eat our maggot cheese. And then they just started fucking with, like, outsiders by making them do it.

Yeah, at the same time, it's just straight pecorino cheese that's made from sheep's milk. So it's not like it's that crazy, but it creates kind of this very soft, creamy texture. It says that it has a very pungent, spicy flavor. They'll cut slices off and put it in sandwiches. Like, I just, I don't understand why you would want to do it. It doesn't make any sense to me. They do say that it has kind of like a creamy Gorgonzola-type feel to it. Not good enough.

Not enough reason. But at the same time, cheese is not just for eating. Cheese isn't just for enjoying. You can also enjoy cheese in many other ways besides eating. One of them is cheese sport. What about cheese chase? Cooper's Hill cheese rolling and wake. Everyone has seen a clip of this.

Yep. If you have ever visited the internet, you have seen footage of this. So the earliest written records of this date back to 1836. and they believe that this was happening even before 1836. It was just never really written down. And the whole idea behind this is this event takes place every year where participants race down a 200-yard long, 180 meters long hill. Is it always the same hill?

Mm-hmm. Okay. It's this Cooper's Hill. They're chasing a 7 to 9-pound wheel of this double glossure cheese. It's fucking awesome. It's so good. There are so many injuries. Yeah.

But this cheese is, I mean, it's a very superior cheese. If there's a cheese to chase after, this would be one that I would think about. But this is like the running of the bowls, except for just people. Except they're hurting them. It's gravity. The bulls, the thing that cause injury is gravity. It takes place. Inertia and gravity.

And I'm sure I'm butchering this every time I say any of these shires, but Gloucester Shire, England. the hill is 942 feet 287 meters tall it's got a near 50% grade it's just it's so dangerous like just thinking in the sense of 45 degrees is halfway between 90 yeah dude it's so bad these competitors again as Chris is talking about

they try and catch this cheese which is given a one second head start down this hill they don't ever catch cheese, but the first one to cross the finish line... Just catch fucking concussions. Yeah. The first person that crossed the finish line is rewarded with said cheese wheel. There was one year where I don't know what they were thinking, but they decided to replace

the cheese wheel with a styrofoam wheel. I don't know what in the hell it was. And then they just gave the winner a cheese wheel. This lasted one year. And there was a massive uproar about keeping this sport traditional and using an actual... About the purity. We love cheese. There's other events.

This event, it's not like it's just one race. These races, they have men's and women's division, and these races are held from most of the day. We have a senior's heat. Yeah, yeah, I wonder if they have that. A lot of people die in the seniors heat. Well, the important thing to know is the most, the biggest rule is the minimum age requirement is 10 years old. Thank God they're being responsible. Yeah, because 11 and 12 years old.

Those bones, those kids just bounce at that point. There was an interview that I was listening to for. phomologist and she was talking about how this is how you know how good countries with socialized medicine are, or medicine are, is because they're willing to have people that are more adventurous and do stupid shit like this because it's free medical care eventually when it's done with. There's other events that are taken on during the day that are actually, they're pretty cool because you have these specialty cheesemakers that are making these wheels, but they do rolling competitions to see how far they can roll.

So you're talking about specially engineered wheels of cheese that are perfectly flat on each side and they have a perfect roundness to it. It's the cheese Olympics is basically what this event is turned into. They're made specifically for these events to see how far they can roll. This is athletically engineered cheese to perfect specification. Yes, this is the Ivan Drago of cheeses. No cheese episode, really no episode is completely. without throwing a conspiracy theory in there.

Okay. So, of course, in the United States, we have all these conspiracy theories. A con case, so conspiracy theory. There you go. Got one last one in before the buzzer. I like it. Okay. So we know about the Denver airport conspiracy and all of these underground bunkers that the elites and the government have for when shit goes wrong.

Yep. In the 1960s and 70s, I believe Carter was kind of the one that spearheaded this in the 70s. they began purchasing these surplus dairy products to try to stabilize farmers' incomes. And of course, you can't purchase all of this milk and not do anything with it because it's going to go bad. So they turn the milk into longer lasting cheese. It's put into storage vaults. And occasionally, as it's getting close to a due date, a going bad day, the government will release these cheese into, or release these cheeses into food pantries,

other nonprofits that help with like food insecurity areas. They actually do pretty good stuff with it. Not all administrations do. Some administrations are really shitty and let this stuff spoil and then incinerate it. Not going to go any further than that, but I think we can narrow it down a little bit. Cheese is mostly located in a 3.2 million square foot subterranean industrial park that's located in Springfield, Missouri. It's like cheese knocks? We have an underground cheese cave.

You said it's cave, yeah. Total U.S. cheese stockpile exceeds 1.4 million pounds and is scattered across dozens of these subterranean climate-controlled facilities nationwide. So when shit hits the fan, at least we can sprinkle some cheese on it. Yep. Again, it's how American is it that these cheese stocks are mostly American cheese? and cheddar cheese. So we're not getting the fancy stuff.

We're not getting anything else. If this is cheese that we have to store underground for when stuff goes bad. When shit goes bad, we're just making nachos. You're telling me we're making nachos and samis. Ballpark nachos. Uh-huh. Yep, we'll be able to do whatever we can.

But the history of cheese is so just phenomenally fun. And it's something that is just, it's wholly good. it puts a smile on your face. I can 100% say that I have learned more from this episode, more applicable knowledge from this episode, than I have from any other episode we've done. And if you haven't learned enough, if you just want to take one thing from this last little bit,

cheese will get you high. Okay, yes, I explain this. So cheese can trigger like this mild to moderate dopamine response. the way that your body metabolizes it is going to change it a little bit different. But in the fermenting process, as this casein molecule inside this cheese is converted into something called casomorphine. Casomorphines will... That's what happens after you eat too much casso and you get sleepy and tired. And yeah.

You feel like you're on morphine. It's like the idas that you get from eating turkey from the triptfen. So just like we talked about, no spoilers on the Patreon. but just as we talked about with methamphetamine, it is able to cross over that blood-brain barrier. These casomorphines attach themselves to opioid and dopamine receptors in the brain. And you get this mild stress relief feeling and this feeling of pleasure. This is why some people make the argument that you can be addicted to cheese.

Because you're getting... You're answering so many questions about questions I have about my wife right now. these pleasure responses for cheese. I don't ever want to fucking hear her be like, oh, you make another trip out to the garage. Like, oh, are you eating cheese again? The other thing

about it is it takes right around 10 pounds of milk to produce one pound of cheese. So all of this case and all of these fucking these case, whatever they are, the case in molecules or whatever get concentrated

from 10 pounds of this in milk down to just one pound of this highly concentrated casomorphine. And this significant concentration just will absolutely put you in a better mood. So basically it's the dabs, it's dairy dabs. It really truly is. It's dairy dabs. So instead of going home and popping an antidepressant, if you've had a rough day, if you don't want to crack open a beer or sip some whiskey or smoke a little hot leaf,

just eat a little cheese. Yeah. Make you a hell of a lot better. Get yourself a cheese stick. Exactly. Oh, God. I'm so glad we did this because this means that other stuff

is now open for business. Yeah, if you guys like this, wine, salt, beer, all sorts of different alcohols, hard liquors. I would love to do wine because to be able to explain stuff from different areas and all that kind of stuff, we'll see how this, you know, is taken, but I don't see people having a problem with this.

This is fun as shit Everyone loves cheese Yeah Even gluten intolerance Even lactose intolerant people I don't respond well To lactose and I love cheese So

Can't beat it Now you know If you don't want to fight If you have a lactose intolerance You can shred it There you go Yeah I got another one I like that

I got close to a dozen I got close All right Any other questions No No You have addressed All of my cheese

related questions and quandaries. I love this. Yeah, I mean, talk about a perfect night. Yes. Smoking a little weed. Yeah, little. Challenging the mayor's son to a gentleman's duel. All right.

Well, hey, thanks for this. Absolutely. It was my pleasure. All right. Well, we will catch you guys next time. Hope you enjoyed it. Peace.