Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: The Cheesiest SYSK Episode Ever

Episode Date: October 21, 2017

In this week's SYSK Select episode, cheese is often overlooked as a one of humanity's great achievements. Making cheese is surprisingly easy: It's been accidentally created by more than one culture at different times. Tune in to learn more about cheese -- and enjoying it -- in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi folks, this is Chuck here. Welcome to the Saturday Selects edition of Stuff You Should Know.

This week I am picking out the cheesiest SYSK episode ever from August 25th, 2011. This is not a show about bad music, but this is a show about cheese. I love cheese. Josh loves cheese. A lot of people love cheese. And this ended up being a very dense, probably could have been a two-parter, but a really cool episode about the history of cheese and how it's made and just the varieties of cheese. You could have an entire 14-part series on cheese, but as we do, we decided to cram as

much as we could into one episode. So pour up some wine, cut some cheese metaphorically, actually not metaphorically, and enjoy this episode. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always is Charles W. So funny. Chuck Bryant. Is that a new nickname?

So funny Chuck. My wife would beg to differ. She might say I'm not so funny sometimes. No? Okay. So Chuck. Yes. How are you doing?

I'm great. I've got an intro this time. Awesome. How long has it been? I don't know. It's been a while. Really? Yeah.

Since we've had a proper intro? Yes. Okay. If you ask me. So let me paint the picture for you. All right. So in 2010, a little newspaper called The Telegraph, I believe out of London, published an article about a recent survey of 4,000 British consumers of what were the top 100 most important inventions

ever created by man. Okay. So some of them were not surprising. The wheel came in first place, beer is on there, and it came in. Was it on there? I don't know. I can tell you, painkillers were on there in 13th place, 15th place. But no man, I didn't see beer on here, and surely it is.

Maybe that was just, they don't consider that an invention. Sliced bread came in 70th place. The iPhone came in 8th place. What? Ahead of the combustion engine. That's ridiculous. In 87th place came calendars. Okay.

But then right after that, in 88th place came the cheese grater. Hmm. Yeah. The grater. The cheese grater. That makes me think. So first of all, this is clearly one of the dumbest assemblages of 4,000 people ever put together.

Calendar and then cheese grater. And then iPhone number eight. Yeah. So I think that possibly, I'm going to give them the benefit out, that they didn't assume that cheese was invented by humans. The cheese grater was clearly invented by humans, you don't find them growing on trees. Cheese apparently you find growing on trees, it's a gift from God. But I think had the pollsters said, you know, I just want to remind you here that cheese

is an invention, that it would have scored higher, at least 88, it would have at least replaced the cheese grater. Oh yeah. Well, England, I don't know how they are in cheese, but the EU is real big on cheese. It is as a whole. So Wisconsin. Yeah. So is, well yeah, the EU.

Yeah. Yeah. New York. I think of Germany and. It's in the EU. France. Greece. Denmark.

Belgium, they're all like in the top. It's about 10. Yes. Greece is way ahead of us. And well, Greece comes up in some stats that are coming right after this. But Chuck, cheese is an invention and as legend goes, an accidental invention, right? Yeah. I mean, they have seen it dated back to prehistory, so they can't obviously trace it back to 6000

BC and say how it happened, right? Well they can say that it was around at least as late as 3200 BC because it was found in the tomb of one of the Egyptian pharaohs, cheese, 5000 year old cheese, which, wow. And the idea goes, the legend goes that there was some shepherd, some goat herder, some cow herder, which I guess you'd call a rancher, went to, I guess, go tend to his flock and he had his daily milk and he used a cowskin or a cow stomach, a calf stomach specifically to store the milk and when he went to go drink it, it came out all curdled and smacked his face and he said, what is going on here?

He told some people about it and it took root. Now see, I read that Rokafort was invented by accident by a shepherd. Yes. I read that too. And he was, he stashed his lunch in a cave because he saw a young maiden that he wanted to go get down with and he forgot about his lunch and came back like a couple weeks later. It was moldy and he ate it anyway and was like, hey, this is pretty tasty. Yeah.

He's like, I like this a lot. So that makes me think these tales might be just intermingling some. Well, they are tales. There's nothing specific, nothing documented. But Rokafort also supposedly is from dates to about the time of Christ. So if cheese was known to the Egyptians in 3200 BC, and it would have come before that. But it's possible they were invented independently, accidentally, right? That's true.

There are a lot of shepherds running around at that time, a lot more than these days. That's true. And Rokafort is also a PDO, which is a protected designation of origin cheese. That's true man. Which means it's got to be made in Rokafort, Sur, Solzant. Right. It's specifically this mountain range, this small area of mountaintop. Got to get the sheep from there.

They're France. Got to age it in the caves there. Yep. Or you're not eating Rokafort. And still to this day, speaking of how Rokafort is produced, these shepherds, they still kind of dress like they used to during medieval times. Like Little Bo Peep. Kind of.

But they all have beards. It's really kind of disturbing to go to this area. The families make the cheese from their own flocks milk and then take it to the caves where it's purchased by often yours, which are expert finishers of cheese in France. Which means they just sit around and look at it. Yeah. They're like, come on. The cheese is done.

So that's just a brief sketch of cheese history, right? Yeah. And that's the most interesting stuff I would think. All right. Well, that's the podcast. All right. Well, let's talk cheese, man. You know these stats are interesting.

Yeah. In 2009, the average American consumed, or the Americans consumed an average, depending on which way you want to look at it, of 32.9 pounds a couple of years ago per person per year. Say that one more time. 32.9 pounds. Let's just call it 33 pounds of cheese per person per year. I love cheese, but I don't think I eat that much.

I had no idea I was eating that much cheese. I might be though, dude. I love cheese. I'm going to start paying attention. I'm going to do a yearly cheese count. Also this, what was it, like 33 pounds per American per year of cheese? Yeah. Can we take a few ounces?

That's part of 82 billion pounds of cheese that America alone produces, or produced I should say in 2008. And get this. 82 billion? 82 billion pounds. I got like eight different stats on that. Yeah. There's a lot of different stats out there.

It's true. I got from 9 billion down to 10.1 million. I got 82 billion. Wow. We're all over the place with that one. I suddenly, like really, well, okay. This is from like a cheese board. Probably Wisconsin.

I probably would have been like the Delaware cheese board. I'm not listening to this. But in 1975, we ate 14 pounds of cheese a person. So we've doubled our cheese intake since 75. That's really something. What year were you born? 1976. Might have something to do with it.

I knew I was destined for something. But the Greeks are up to close to 60 pounds a year. Yeah. The Greeks in the French apparently score between 53 to 73 pounds on average per person. The Greeks in the French are tied as the world's greatest consumers of cheese. That's a lot of feta. That is. And feta is probably the oldest cheese, by the way, speaking of cheese history.

It's also one of the simplest. Yeah. I love crumbly, delicious feta. Right. Feta, if you went to Greece and grabbed some feta that some Greek shepherd farmer had just made, and you brought it back to the U.S., they would slap the cuffs on you, the FDA would. Oh, because it's the aging laws we have here are different.

Yeah. It's a raw milk cheese. And which means it's made from, it's a fresh kind of cheese made from unpasteurized milk. And in the U.S., if you make that kind of cheese, if you make cheese using pasteurized milk, you have to age it 60 days at least. Unpasteurized milk. Unpasteurized milk. Yeah.

So this is just this, like we just stepped into this fascinating world, if you ask me. Yeah. Pasteurization just quickly is, most people know is when you take food, usually a liquid, though, you heat it up really hot for a specific amount of time at a specific temperature, then you cool it down real quickly. And the goal there is to slow down microbial growth, but not stop it. Right. Because that would be sterilization.

Huh. And not pasteurization. Right. Named after the great Louis Pasteur. Yeah. And if you, you don't want to sterilize it because that, that ruins the flavor. So. I would imagine.

Yeah. Sterilized milk. Sterilized cheese. Yeah. Gross. It's not good stuff. But not only is pasteurization good for your health, most would say. Yeah.

And cheese kind of serves like the hardcore kind that have like mohawks with like Elmer's glue. Right. Sure. They will tell you that the only good cheese comes from, she's made from unpasteurized milk. Yeah. Raw milk cheese. Yeah.

But other people will tell you, you're not really right. We can make really good cheese with pasteurized milk and pasteurized milk makes for an easier cheese making process. It's more reliable. It's more predictable. Yeah. If you're making tons, metric tons of cheese, you want something consistent like that. Right.

All right. What a Wham-Bang start. Why you talk about milk all the time with cheese, Josh? Well, because cheese is really just a portable form of milk. Yeah. You know, it's, it's basically, it's like grain represents virtual water. Sure. You ship grain from one place to another.

You're really shipping the water that was used to produce the grain in addition to it. Yeah. I remember seeing those commercials. Like, I think it was Kraft. Like there are two cups of milk in every slice of Kraft American cheese and I always thought, that's impossible. Yeah. Look at it.

That little slice of cheese and look at two cups of milk. There's no way. You're probably right though. No. They can't say that. They're the, it's like the second biggest food company on the planet. I think, yeah, I think they could probably say that, yeah. So you're right, Josh.

I can tell you and me. Milk, cheese is nothing but milk. Milk is about 80% water if you remove this water, you got cheese basically. Yeah. It's a little more complicated than that. But. It's not that much more complicated. No.

I was really surprised. Like both of us apparently went our own way and learned how to make cheese and I have to say like, I am strongly considering getting me and you me into cheese making. You can make mozzarella pretty easily. Yeah. But I'm not big. I'm okay on mozzarella. I like a good mozzarella.

Yeah. So before I'm into like the slightly stinkier cheeses. I don't know if you can pull off making like a Limburger. Well, I wouldn't make that but I could make like a Gouda or a Chevrolet. Chevrolet. Yeah. I like that too. Speaking of Limburger quickly, I don't remember the name of the bacteria but the bacteria used

in making Limburgers the same one on our body that creates body odor, which is why it stinks. I read that as well. Yeah. Yeah. That's why people say it smells like feet because it does. Yes, and scientifically speaking, you're absolutely right. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place

be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? Also leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Types of cheese? Should we break that down real quick? Yes, we should because there's a big contentious debate about how you classify cheese. This guy, Stephen Jenkins for this article, seems to have a pretty good handle on how cheese should be classified. Josh, he's a member of the Conferi des Chevaliers du Test de Formage.

Very nice. Thank you. Very nice. I was looking at that like, I wonder if I'm going to have to handle that one. It's cheese connoisseurs and he's an expert and he says you can break him down into fresh fresh, soft ripened, wash rind, natural rind, blue veined, uncooked pressed, cooked pressed and processed. And Chuck, like we were talking about already, the fresh cheeses, those are the easiest,

the most basic, the most ancient kind. You've got your feta, you have a queso fresco, mascarpone, not marscapone, the R goes after the S so it's marscapone. I wonder why that is always mispronounced. I have no idea. Because I thought it was marscapone until I read it and I was like, huh, that rolls off the tongue though more than the, the R's rolls off the tongue more than the, is this a zure?

Mascarpone. Yeah. Which isn't even really cheese, technically, right? No, it isn't. You skim the cream off of the top of the Parmesan making process and add a culture to it and you got mascarpone. Rigot, also known as ricotta, but if you're from New Jersey, you might say rigot. Yeah.

Okay. And cream cheese, obviously. Yeah. And I think you mentioned queso fresco, right? Yes. Those are fresh cheeses. Yeah. Those are the ones where you just basically go through step one through three of cheese

making and then you just start eating it. Yeah. And some of them still contain the liquid part, the whey. Right. And they don't keep very long and that is fresh cheeses. That's just why you got to eat them right away. That's right. It's a, it's a portable way of preserving milk, but it's only preserving milk for like

an extra day or two. Right. It's very mild taste. Very milky. Okay. Soft ripened cheeses. Josh, they are semi-soft. A lot of times they have a white, bloomy rind and we're talking brie, a little more flavorful

and buttery, but still pretty mild. Yeah. So the rind on brie specifically or any kind of bloomy rind cheese is made from bacteria, right? There's a lot of bacteria going on with cheese. Right. Well, they, they just rubbed bacteria on the outside of the cheese, maybe some salt and the bacteria starts to rot the cheese effectively from the outside in.

Very effectively. So that's what the, that's what the rind is. Some people say you should eat the rind cause it is cheese, but it's bacteria laden cheese. I eat the rind. Do you? I actually don't. Oh yeah. Really?

Yeah. Yeah. I dive right into that, that brie. And brie as far as smell goes is one of the milder bloomy rind cheeses. Most bloomy rind cheeses and most soft ripe and cheeses are the stinky ones like Stilton, which is the king of English cheeses. I love me some Stilton. Limburger.

Yeah. Rokefort. Yeah. All right. So now we are at Wash Rind. Those are the stinkiest of cheeses, Limburger. And if we mentioned some of these is cause they overlap into different categories. Right.

Wash rind means these usually have as a reddish orange rind and the stink comes from washing it most times in liquid like brine or wine or beer. Yeah. Makes it stinky. You might make a wheel of cheese if it's a soft ripened cheese and just throw it in like a brine bath and leave it for maybe six days per side. It's going to float on top and then you flip it. Yeah.

Leave it for another six days and you've got it washed. And that's, it stinks because of the mold and bacteria that grows because of that wash. Yeah. So here in wine bath also came from the introductions of cheese to monks. Oh, yeah. We said, hey, we make beer. We make wine. It's kind of what we contribute to the world.

Plus we've got these caves so, you know, but you can't have a cocktail party without cheese. Exactly. So there you go. That's where that comes from. Natural rind moving on is heavier than most of other types of cheeses. It's aged usually cause not all cheeses aged. A lot of them are made from raw milk and again, English Stilton and Chevrolet are natural

rind cheeses. That's when the rind forms naturally. Yes. Correct? Yes. Okay. So rind, I guess I should correct myself. The stinky ones almost always have some sort of bacterial induced rind, whether it's hastened

along by washing or it just happens naturally. Right. If you've got a rind usually going, if you have a moldy rind, you're going to have a stinkier cheese. Okay. Okay. Yes. And then where are we chucking?

Blue veined. Blue veined, that's Roke Fort, Gorgonzola, Maytag Blue. It's exactly what it... These are my favorites, by the way. Do you like these? I love blue cheese. Love, love blue veined cheese. Yeah.

Eat it all day long. It's exactly what it sounds like. Everybody's seen it. You know, you get a hunk of this and it's just like crumbly and it looks deteriorated. It's so good. But that blue or the green, the veins in it is mold. Yeah. Pretty healthy, active, live mold, too.

Very tart. That's one of the cheeses that makes my jaw just go, gurgle, gurgle, gurgle. Do you eat it as a dessert cheese? No, I don't do a ton of dessert cheeses. Sometimes if I'm at a restaurant that has a nice dessert cheese menu. But I just, you know, I like the cheese and wine thing. We'll get to that, though. Okay.

And then lastly, well it's third to lastly, we've got the pressed cheeses cooked and uncooked, right? So uncooked cheese is cheddar cheese. Good old cheddar. Just the orange block of cheese is uncooked and cheddar is actually the name of a process of making cheese. Cheddaring is taking the curds and just pressing them down on top of one another until you squeeze all the way out.

Yeah. And all these pressed cheeses are really dry because you're just getting, you're pressing the way out, like you said. You're just pressing the liquid. So it's going to be much drier, like your hard Parmigiano, Reggiano, cheddar, what else? And also as a side note, cheese, orange cheese, like orange cheddar, you know how it's like brilliantly orange sometimes, you're like, that can't possibly be a real orange. What's going on there?

It's not. Apparently back in the day, in the spring and summer. This is the fact of the show for me. Is it? I think so. I would say the 33 pounds per person. The gross fact of the show. But if you want to celebrate cheese at a cocktail party, just say what Josh is about to say.

I think you should take this. No. I think you should. Okay. Back in the day, if you had your flock out of sheep or goats or cows and it was spring or summer, they were chewing grass. When they ate grass, they were ingesting a lot of beta carotene, right? And vitamin D.

Yeah. Okay. Which lent a lot of that stuff to the milk, which ultimately lent a lot of it to the cheese, which ultimately dyed it orange. And in the winter months, they were eating hay, which made kind of for paler, wand-looking cheese. It might have tasted as good, but people tended to prefer orange cheese. They just thought it was better.

So over time, people said, well, we're just going to start dyeing all of our cheese orange. And that's where it came from. And to this day, apparently it's just an open secret that among cheese makers, you dye your cheese orange if you're making an orange cheese. Fact of the show. Yes. It's a carotene, grass, summer, spring, history. So like we said, those are the, the pressed cheeses, Gruyere, Reggiano, they're all

pressed. I love Gruyere. It can be cooked or uncooked. Cheddar is uncooked, right? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. But so if you take the curds and you, you just press them and that's uncooked pressed,

obviously enough. Yeah. If you cook the curds and then press them, that's cooked pressed and that's like Gruyere, Gouda. Yeah. Parmesan. Yeah. It's like a provolone, a pasta felata, right?

Pasta fosul. And then processed cheese. We have to mention. Oh yeah. We're going down the cheese chain. Yeah. Yeah. Processed cheese.

Technically again, it's not a cheese. It's a byproduct of the process. It can have cheese scraps, can have whey and cream and water, gums, dyes, other ingredients. You can work your way further down to easy cheese. Yeah. Cheese whiz, velvita. You know when a cheese doesn't need to be refrigerated, it's like, and it comes out of a propellant.

Yeah. I was going to say, if you have cheese in a can, that's a big giveaway usually. Sodium citrate, sodium phosphate, calcium phosphate, sorbic acid, sodium alginate, ap... I don't even know how to pronounce this, apocarotenol, anato. These are all things in easy cheese. Cheese isn't easy though. So I think that should be your other giveaway.

Yeah. Cheese takes time. Yes. It's not easy. Although you think it's easy to make. Although there is such a product as easy cheese, I believe. No, that's what I'm saying. That's the stuff in the can.

Oh, okay. That you scored out onto a cracker. So that's easy cheese. That's... I mean, that is the brand name. Well, what's the one where the cheese is... It's like in a little plastic tray and the cheese is on one side of the crackers around the other, and there's like that little red plastic spreader?

Spreader, yeah. That's... I mean, that's some sort of processed cheese. Okay. That's technically not cheese. No. So there you go. And also, you can make cheese from pretty much any kind of milk.

Like traditionally you've got cow, goat, sheep... Buffalo. Buffalo. But you can also make camel cheese and horse cheese and moose cheese, and I haven't had any of those. Anything with nipples that's lactating, you can go ahead and milk and make cheese from. Even just the little cat, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, camel cheese, I'm interested to try that, so maybe someday we can make that happen. So I don't know if anybody should try to mail that to us, though. Camel cheese in the mail? No. I don't think so. So speaking of lactating, right? Yeah. Let's talk about how cheese is made, Chuck.

Well, Josh, there's a lot of different ways to make cheese depending on what kind of cheese. Like it gets very specific, obviously. We can't say that you do this for two hours and age it for this long. Right, right. But there are four main stages, which is curdling or coagulating of the milk, shaping of the curds, draining of the curds, salting, washing and seeding, and then maturing. And then we can get more detailed right now.

Somewhere in there is the running of the bowls. So cheese, I'm sorry, the milk comes in. It's got to be heated to a specific temperature. Yes, because, again, milk is nothing but curds in way. Right? So we're going to separate these. That's the first step. Yeah, and the way to separate them is to create lactic acid.

Milk is Chuck full of lactose, but for it to lose its stability, it's a type of sugar. It's a milk sugar. But for milk to lose its stability and break into curds, which are globby, semi-solid masses, and whey, which is basically like milky water, you need to convert the lactose to lactic acid. The lactose, the milk sugar, holds everything together. And to convert it to lactic acid, you introduce bacteria. Yeah, there's a few different ways you can do it.

It could be lemon juice or vinegar, or it can be an actual bacterial culture, and it doesn't take much of this. I saw the Dirty Jobs Micro, I mean they had, I think it was a 5,000 pound batch of cheese that they were making this huge vat of milk, and he added what looked like about the size of this mug of bacteria culture to it. Yeah. So it goes a long way. Well, there's a lot to them.

They're very small. There's a whole lot going on in there. Yeah. So if you do use bacteria, you're probably going to use either a thermophilic, which is a heat-loving bacteria, or a mesophilic, which is like a kind of a warm, tepid temperature bacteria. Right. But either way, they're going to go in there, and they're going to go to town on the lactose

and convert as a byproduct lactic acid, right? So then all of a sudden you have curdled milk. That's step one done. Step two is where that legend about that shepherd comes in. Yeah, with rennet. Yes. Renneting. Yes.

Renitation. I don't know if that's a word. What is rennet? Rennet is enzymes, are enzymes from the stomach lining of the cow, or a sheep, or a goat. Well, a young one. A kid. Yeah. If you will.

Or a calf. Well, you wouldn't want to some old cow's stomach lining anyway. Well, it's not necessarily there anyway. The whole reason that this enzyme is in there is so a young cow can break down mother's milk and digest it. Exactly. So when you add it to milk, Josh, it makes the casein into curds. And casein is one of the proteins in milk and whey is the other one.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. And it is casein, so look that up. Well, there's other types of rennet too, actually. There's vegetable rennet, everything from like sunflowers and ivy to papaya and malo. But I don't know if the taste is the same. I guess it is.

No, I'm sure it's not the same. And I've also seen that papaya and pineapple doesn't work as well. Oh, really? Yeah. And then if you use one like stinging nettle, stinging nettle works really well, but you have to basically create like a brine that you introduce into the cheese so it affects the flavor so you can only use it for certain kinds of cheese. But yes, if you are a vegetarian, there is such thing as vegetarian cheese out there.

And if you're not a vegetarian, there is calf stomach in your cheese. Yum. But just a tiny bit, apparently a thumbnail full is like the rule of thumb, excuse the pun. So the coagulation period, it depends on what kind of cheese you're making, but sometimes this is as little as 30 minutes, sometimes this is as much as 36 hours. But it sets. It's like chocolate mousse, you know?

It looks set, but it's sort of separate underneath. Like the top is solid, and then you've got the way underneath. But if you, apparently, well, there's plenty of ways still left in the stuff that's set too. But I guess if you stick your finger in there, this is what I've read, if you stick your finger in there and it comes out clean, then it's set. It's like a pumpkin pie. Right, exactly.

Except you don't eat your finger. No. So when you've got this thing set, you cut it with a thing called a harp, which is a curd cutting knife. Yeah, it looks sort of like, I guess there's different ones, but I think a lot of them are made out of fishing line. And so you're just, yeah, like a harp or guitar strings, you're just kind of gently passing it through, breaking it up.

And you're cutting it usually into like little cubes, half inch cubes, that kind of thing. And that alone releases the way. Yeah. Right? So you drain the way off until you have just the curds. And then you cut, you either use large curds, smaller curds. You may cut the curds up some more, you may use them as they are right then. I think for mozzarella, that's about it.

Yeah. You want to keep the curds separate though, like curds want to join back together. And so it's a, I mean, maybe they have machines, but it's smaller dairies. You have like six or eight people in there, just churning the stuff up with their hands between their fingers constantly. And that's the hardest part, I think. Yeah. So you got that.

You got the curds separated from the way. You're getting more and more way out. And then you might cook the curds. If it's a cooked type of cheese, like cooked pressed, like Gouda, you might just start mashing them together if it's cheddar. And then that stuff, the bacteria for cheeses like Stilton or Roke Ford or whatever, the bacteria that you use as a starter starts to come into play. Because now it's done being cooked, it's done being heated or warmed, and the bacteria is

going to start to thrive because you're giving it a temperature, you're putting in a climate, I should say. That it loves. Where bacteria loves. Like cheese is, like when you first make cheese, it's not very tasty, it's kind of rubbery. You need to, if it is a ripened cheese, you need to let it ripen. And ripening is basically the further conversion of lactose to lactic acid by this bacteria over a period of like weeks or months or years.

And that gives the cheese its flavor. It's stink too, but that's what gives cheese its flavor is the activation of this bacteria. That's right. Another thing that helps with the flavor and all cheese will have is salt. And salt does a few things. It speeds up the drying process, it enhances the flavor. It helps the rind to form if you need a rind and it slows down the microbial growth, which is good.

But all cheese has salt. And it's added at different times too, from what I've seen, depending on what kind of cheese you're making. And sometimes it's straight up salt, sometimes it's a briny wash, so it all depends on what you're doing. Yeah, when they make a rope for it again, they just take the wheel of cheese and rub salt on it on the outside of it until all the pores are closed and then that creates the rind at the beginning of it.

So you've got your cheese ripen, you've got it sitting in a cave-like environment, right? Yeah, temperature and humidity are very important down to the degree and percentage. Very controlled. Yes. So, before you stick it in the cave, Chuck, you might want to needle it, depending on what kind of cheese you're making. Is it in the mold yet? Yeah.

Okay. Yes. It's in the mold, it's pressed. Yeah. If you're needling it, you probably, I don't know if you started to create the rind or not yet. Maybe you probably would. With needling in particular, blue vein cheese is your favorite.

They really get their kickstart from this mold, this bacteria that loves oxygen. So you have to poke holes in the cheese, little tiny holes, this is needling and bring the oxygen to the bacteria so they can create the mold. Needling is not a nice thing to do unless you're making cheese. That's true. Or sewing. Right, I guess. So what you're doing is actually bringing the oxygen to the mold so it can turn into

that great blue vein cheese, which is really, you realize it's rotted dairy is what a blue vein cheese is. I know exactly what it is. All right. You don't like it? No, I do. Oh, okay. I just wanted to make sure you knew what you were getting into.

Oh, I know. So that's some of them, I mean, some of the cheeses you can get are hairy moldy. Hey, friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the Backyard Guest House over childhood home, now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too.

Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Which episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s? Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you heard of Casu Marzu? No. Okay. Prepare for this, man.

Casu Marzu is made and illegal in Sardinia, Italy, and it's this type of cheese. It's a sheep's milk cheese, which makes it a pecorino, because it's in Italy. It's what they call sheep's milk cheeses. During the cheese making process, the cheese makers, the underground cheese makers, allow this type of fly called a cheese skipper to lay eggs, which become maggots in the cheese. The maggots crawl through the cheese, eating the milk fat, and creating an enzyme that putrefies the cheese. That's just stinking it up.

Molding, but putrefying it. If you, and apparently it's absolutely delicious, you can't necessarily compare it to a taste of, I've read a couple of things on it, and everybody says it's a sensation. It can burn the tongue, right? It's so acidic. But if you are really to eat Casu Marzu the right way, you eat it with the live maggots on it. And these maggots can jump six inches off of the cheese.

So if you can't stomach the idea of eating live maggots, or don't want digestive problems for the rest of your life, you will put a little bit of the cheese that you're going to eat in a paper bag, hold it up tight, and wait for the popping sound of the maggots jumping off the cheese to stop, which means they're all dead. Awesome. Then you can eat the cheese. Would you eat that? Totally.

I would too. I would eat it with the dead maggots. I wouldn't try it. I mean, it's got to taste good. It's not like they're eating something disgusting. I mean, it sounds disgusting, but the taste is disgusting. No, I would definitely eat it without the maggots. If I had to, if the only way to try it was with the live maggots, I would, I would not

be happy about it. I would strongly prefer eating it without the maggots. Okay. Yeah. Just want to know. So this is Kazumar's view, man. In my opinion, the coolest cheese I've ever created. Now, that's just like cool cheese stuff, how to make it, what it is.

Types. But if you're asking practicality guys, where's my practicality in my daily cheese life, my cheesy life, which by the way, the etymology of that, I look that up, they think that it's an ironic reversal from 19th century British slang when cheesy meant fine and showy. So they think that's an ironic reversal. I don't know about that. Yeah. I think some sorority girls said it and it caught wildfire.

Yeah. It seems like one of those kind of words like cheesy. It was just, it was sitting there waiting for it to be picked up and used in that way. So it did in the 1896, apparently the late 1800s, it meant cheap and inferior as slang in the United States. Something was cheesy. And then it died for a little while for a century. Who knows?

Anyway, I was curious about that. So cutting the cheese, Josh, there are ways you should cut the cheese. Okay. I mean, you would laugh at that. It depends on the shape and size and this is all from cheese.com, by the way, your cheese resource on the web. You divide the cheese so that you get an equal share of the inside and the outside if you want to do it properly.

Okay. It makes sense. Round cheeses are cut in wedges like a cake. Cheese bought in slices should be cut lengthwise. Okay. Not across. And tall truffles are easier if sliced horizontally. Truffles?

Yeah. It's like a tall barrel cheese. Okay. It's like taller than it is wide. Yeah. Not like a big wheel. So it's a cylindrical cheese. Yes.

That's a chuckle. Matching cheese and wine, there are no hard and fast rules, but generally, wider and fresher cheeses go with crisper and fruitier wines. Yeah. You're not a big wine guy. No, I enjoy wine with cheese. Okay. I'm into rosés.

That's right. Right now. Smooth, fatty cheese goes well with smooth, slightly oily wine. Wine with like globs of fat floating on top. No oily wine though. What's an oily wine? Well, I can't think of one off the top of my head, but an oily wine. Yeah.

Huh. No. I've never heard of it. Sweet wine, Josh. Yeah. Jerry's laughing. Contrast with highly acidic cheese. White wines usually go better than red wines, even though I love my red wine with the cheese.

Yeah. Dry, fresh wines are ideally suited to soft cheese, goat cheese. Dry white. Dry, fresh red. Oh, okay. Ideally suited to soft cheeses. Gotcha. You can also match cheese with beer and cider, obviously, and they say to try regional combinations

like if the wine is from a region and cheese is from a region, chances are they probably go well together. That's a good idea. Yeah. It's a good rule to follow. So, I have a piece of advice based on my own experience. There is nothing better you can do for like an hour or a half hour, whatever you can get away with.

I'm like a Saturday afternoon when you have the time, then to go to a place that has like a real live cheese monger who knows what they're talking about and going up to them and saying, hey, I really like this kind of block cheese I've been eating for a while, and I'm ready to expand my horizon, so can you introduce me to some? And watch their eyes light up. Yeah, they'll be very happy. They usually, you know, they'll cut you some samples, they'll kind of walk you through, and it's not ridiculously expensive.

I mean, when you look at the per pound price, you're like 35 bucks, but you're not buying a pound. You just buy like a quarter of a pound usually is about the least you can get. But you still, that lasts quite a while. So I strongly recommend, if you're sitting there eating a block of orange cheese right now, go out and like introduce yourself to the world of cheese because there are some really awesome cheeses out there. There are many good ones, and when you buy these cheeses, you might bring them home

and the next day you found that they're all hard or they're not like they were when you bought it, and that's because you didn't store it properly. And there are some tips here, Josh, for storage from cheese.com. I could use them. The unpasteurized cheese should be not sliced until it's purchased. So if you see it in a place and it's like sliced up, don't get it because that's wrong. Keep the cheese in the condition in which it matures. So hard, semi-hard and semi-soft cheeses should be stored in temperatures from about

eight to 13 degrees Celsius. What is that in Fahrenheit? Oh, no, no. There's conversion tables on the web. Keep the cheese in wax paper and put it in a loose-fitting food bag because you don't want it to lose humidity, but you still want to have air. You don't want it to dry out, so you've got to keep that balance. Blue cheeses, you should wrap really all over because it'll jump onto other foods in

your refrigerator, which you don't want, the mold will, and it'll also infect the other foods with flavors that you might not want. You don't want blue cheese eggs? No, and you don't want your eggs to smell like your blue cheese, which makes sense. You should take the chilled cheeses out of the fridge about an hour to two hours before serving it and wrap soft cheeses loosely. You don't want to wrap it in like plastic wrap, really tight. Again, they recommend wax paper and like a loose ziplock type thing.

You got anything else? I mean, I've got random facts. Monterey Jack comes from David Jack, who lived in Monterey, California. Pretty easy. And it's one of only four Native American cheeses. I think it's Colby, Jack, Brick, and... It's a Native American cheese? Well, Native.

Like from Oklahoma? It's not from Europe. Gotcha. Or wherever. Colby, Jack. Colby, Jack, Brick, and Cheddar, I think are the four American cheeses. And the U.S. gets the number one cheese that we produce in the U.S. American cheese.

Nope. Cheddar cheese. Yeah. Cheddar cheese, too. Mozzarella. Yep. Probably because of all the pizza. Yep.

That would definitely explain all the cheese consumption, too. In Wisconsin, besides their awesome dairy land, they had a bunch of immigrants from Switzerland and Germany and Belgium and France that settled there, so that's kind of why it's the... The Swiss in particular created the heart of the cheese trade in Wisconsin. They were doing it for themselves, starting in the 1830s or the 1840s. And by the 1870s, they were selling outside of the state, so it happened pretty quick. The industrious Swiss. They are industrious with their knives and cheese that go well together.

I know. And finally, Josh, I would invest some money, if you have any, left over, into Kraft if you've got some despair changeling around, because Asia is loving their cheese all of a sudden. Oh, yeah. Yeah. A continent typically not very cheesy. Not much Asian food has cheese.

It's probably due to the rise of the money class in China. Well, it's due to a rise in pizza and cheeseburgers specifically. Yeah. They're loving pizza now, and apparently South Korea is the biggest buyer, and they're like... They've literally doubled and tripled their cheese imports in the past couple of years. So big cheese eating going on over there now. So that's it for cheese, I guess. If you want to know more about cheese, there's a really good article on the site.

Really honestly, it's a good initial primer to get you ready to go to really learn how to make it yourself. You can just type plain old cheese, C-H-E-E-S-E, in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com, which means now it's time for Listener Mail. Spammy Listener Mail. That's what I'm calling this. Thanks for your spam podcast. I worked at the Hormel Institute for six months after my PhD.

You made a brief aside about the smell. Let me tell you something. It was like nothing on earth. On days that I followed the pigs to work, I would anticipate smelling a very pungent version of newly-dead flesh. Then the next day, I would be overwhelmed by the smell of half-cooked meat. It's the most powerful smell, and two years on, I can still smell it. You could not escape it anywhere in the building, even in the back room of the lab.

You mentioned the recession boosting sales. I can attest that was the case. Thankfully, I was living upstream from the factory, though, so my house didn't smell of spam. But large portions of the town do actually smell of spam, particularly on certain production days. All joking aside, I was in love with Minnesota. I loved living in Austin and its people, and would love to live there again in the future.

I never made it to the museum, but they give away spampals. But local restaurants had spam burgers, even though she didn't eat any. So it does think as bad as you think, Josh. I can't imagine it would. Did you see the other person who's moved to Hawaii and has been documenting spam displays? One of the things was macadamia nuts, but spam-flavored macadamia nuts. I'd like to try that, actually. I want to, as well.

Yeah, whoever that is, or anyone in Hawaii, if you could send us some spam macadamia nuts. Nice. That would be good. That's from Elizabeth, and she is a postdoctoral research associate in the bio department at UMass Amherst. UMass. Smart lady. That's a pixie song, right?

It is, yeah. If you want to send Chuck and I a sample of your cheese, especially camel cheese, we want it. Email us and ask us where to send it to, right? Or if you have a cheese story, we want to hear it. That's just so wide open. There's got to be something good in there. Send us an email to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.