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The Molecular Secrets of Cream Cheese
Roland Piquepaille writes "The June issue of Wired Magazine carries a story about one of the two university labs in the U.S. dedicated to cream cheese research. This one is -- where else? -- in Madison, Wisconsin, where researchers are exploring the molecular mysteries of cream cheese. You may not know, but this cheese is tricky to produce because the acid-secreting bacteria used to coagulate the milk need to be killed at the right time. The researchers are now writing a guidebook about the secrets of cream cheese, a book which will be available to anyone, in a process similar to the open source movement for software. For more information, please read the entertaining article of Wired magazine, 'Schmear Campaign' or this summary to discover little-known facts about cream cheese."
"The work is funded by federal grants," (snip other sources of funding, yes I know it's not ALL tax funded)
I am so glad that tax dollars extorted from me are being spent on such important projects. Thanks Uncle Sam!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Strangely, there are not many academical papers about cream cheese.
Yeah. Truly bizarre.
Accounting for inflation, organic milk costs the same as it did 20 years ago. Regular (GMO) milk is cheaper. So you can be cheap or you can be organic. Choice is good.
The real need for research remains nondairy cheese. While there are now excellent vegan alternatives for most everything, milk, ice cream, hot dogs, etc., cheese is really tough to get right. Even most soy cheeses contain casein, a milk protein. Tofutti does make an amazing nondairy cream cheese, but solid, meltable nondairy cheese remains very elusive.
I read them, but I'd like to request that no one else read them. If we all read the article then the "little-known facts" become well-known, and therefore less valuable.
Thanks.
You're making the assumption that wages have kept pace with inflation. They haven't.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Our lifespans are longer than they have ever been in the first world, thanks largely to modern science-based medicine. For most of those "thousands of years" you talk about, people had lifespans of around thirty years. So I think you should show some respect for science, there is no reason to think science can't improve on food, indeed there's every reason to believe it can. And there's definitely no reason to thing that the status quo of the last few millenia is so good that it shouldn't be changed.
Oh no... it's the future.
We have Open Source Cream Cheese now? Oh sweet lord of mercy! All we need is Open Source Bagel and Open Source Toaster. Oh wait, we already have NetBSD.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Not even close. The use of synthetic pesticides disqualifies an item from being organic. Some of the pesticides that they were spraying on your food 20 years ago are now banned because they were found to be unsafe.
They'll probably end up banning some of the current genetic modifications if and when they find problems with it, but that doesn't mean that 20th century agriculture was especially safe. (And prior to the 20th century, there were major health risks in the food supply from natural causes like bacterial contamination. There has never been a safe food utopia.)
How do you value currency, though? Look at the history of gold. The the number of dollars that it cost for gold in 1980 was more than it is today, and that's not taking into effect the time value of money. On Tuesday, September 23, 1980, gold's value was $711.00, valued at Sept 23, 1980 USD. On Thursday, June 01, 2006, gold's value was $625.00 , valued at June 01, 2006 USD. So if I had only gold, and milk cost the same in USD then as it does now, it only costs me 87.9% of what it used to. Factoring in the time value of money, it costs me an insignificant fraction of the original value.
Moral of the story: statistics are fun!
Wrong, you are perpetuating a particularly obnoxious urban myth that comes from a misinterpretation of mortality rate statistics. The mortality rate may have made for an average of thirty years, but that is because infant mortality was very high. If you survived childhood, then you had a good shot at making it to 70, then as now. Ancient literature, such as the Bible and Greek stories, says that "two-score-and-ten" was the average span of days for an adult male, and in poor Eastern European countries before the advent of modern medicine there were never a lack of old people. However, now in the U.S. Americans face the prospect of earlier death than people in comparatively worse-off countries, because of the heart disease stemming from our unhealthy modern diet, as well as the possibility of cancer from industrial methods.
I think mascarpone is better tasting cheese than basic cream cheese. Here's how you make your own.
Heat one quart of light cream (I mix two cups of whipping cream with two cups of whole milk) in a double-boiler to 180 degrees F. After five minutes, pour in two tablespoons of freshly-squeezed lemon juice. Lit it sit at 180F for 30 minutes. Take off the heat, and let it cool, covered, in the refrigerator overnight.
The next day, arrange a sterilized (by boiling) teatowel over another container, and pour the curds and whey into it. Tie up the towel, and suspend it using a skewer over a tall container, like a pitcher. Let it sit in the fridge for 24 hours, dripping away.
The next day, the teatowel will contain yummy mascarpone cheese! Use within about a week to ten days of making it.
I've done this several of times, with excellent results.
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"You spilled my egg... I needed that egg."
As a former resident of Wisconsin, cheese is big business. Huge, in fact. Government grants for cheese and other dairy research are nothing new to the University of Wisconsin. Sure, it might appear like a drain on money, but by doing the research in a public setting it benefits all dairy producers whereas private research only benefits the company or co-op sponsoring it. To justify it all you have to do is imagine the tax benefits of even a few percentage points of additional dairy production.
Besides, I back all agricultural research. Food will become the next major world commodity (aside from fuel). It's easy to make potable water, but trying to compensate year after year of lackluster arable ground is foolish. The United States is one, if not the, top contender for arable land and our rank will only increase as the floodplains of the Asian countries are flooded with ocean water with rising sea levels. Seven billion people have to eat somehow.
Do you wish that Louis Pasteur didn't invent the pasteurization process too? Or are only current scientific advancements "mucking up" our food sources?
and the other one is in -- let me guess -- Philadelphia?
Win win for all the cubbby geeks out there. Now all we need is a breakdown of the chemical structure of the polymer used in real doll construction.
http://nakedip.com/ -- revolutionary web 2.0 site
Do you wish that Louis Pasteur didn't invent the pasteurization process too? Or are only current scientific advancements "mucking up" our food sources?
It's possible that the OP remembers cheese before it became the plastic-wrapped flavourless, dead, waxy stuff that fills the aisles of supermarkets today.
As for Wisconsin or cream cheese, I know I'm not at all interested in technological advances. The last time I had real (fresh, non-pasteurised and and unadulterated) milk or cream was on a farm, and that farm wasn't in Wisconsin. And it came from a decidedly low-tech bovine animal feeding on grass. Unsurprisingly, the farm makes world-famous cheese, the same way it had been making it for hundreds of years.
Maybe the OP has a point?
I'm think I'm in love.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Though indeed helpful to restore normal bacterial populations for those with yeast infections, yoghurt is good all around to keep you healthy. The nutrients yoghurt contains -- while beneficial -- are actually not the most important part. Most beneficial are in fact the live cultures found in many yoghurts. I.E: Just finished off a prescription of antibiotics, did you? Well, the odds are very good that it negatively impacted the microorganisms in your GI tract - to speed your recovery by restoring a natural balance, enjoy your yoghurt.
And that is why even the funding of cheese research might have a tangentally impact upon you.
mmmmmm... cheesecake
Method of processing duck feet
I am from Glenview, Illinois, where Kraft has their HQ. They have a nice R&D plant right in the middle of town, and one time, when I was growing up (I was maybe 11 or 12), my friends and I took a little hike through the wooded area behind it. There was a large storm drain coming out of the plant that led into the North Branch of the Chicago River. What startled my friends and me was the presence of a few guys in biohazard suits scribbing the walls of it off with a high-pressure hose of some kind. Whatever the secret ingredient is for their cream cheese, I hope it doesn't produce whatever they were scrubbing down!
today is spelling optional day.
On the subject of cheese, the distinctions between things like soured, curdled milk, sour cream, cream cheese, mascarpone, and full-fledged cheese are myriad and arcane. I wrote a quick blurb for a friend, explaining what cheese exactly is. I have attached it below, for your perusal. IAACE (I am a cheese expert)...
The world has done very well without scientists mucking up our food sources. How many thousands of years have people lived off what the earth grows?
Really you couldn't be more wrong. They may not have called themselves scientists, but farmers have been selecting crop products basesd on traits for millenia. Do you know what we call corn now looked like before domestication? It's thought to have been derived from teosinte. We've been engineering foods for thousdands and thousands of years. You find one kernel on the plant, grow a few, look for the ones with 2 kernels, and so on. Hell, breadfruit which is found throughout polynesia and micronesia used to reproduce sexually. The current plants are now pretty much all derived from parts of a few original plants and they now rarely, if ever, produce any seeds. To imply that genetic engineering is new is pure and utter garbage. We're simply doing it in a more directed manner now with better tools. Will there be unseen health effects? Sure! In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there are recalls on crops down the line. Is what we're doing now any less natural, I don't think so.
I am so glad that tax dollars extorted from me are being spent on such important projects. Thanks Uncle Sam!
I wonder if you meant this in humour and were completely overlooking the Open Source bias of slashdot.
Here's another way to look at it:
The government funds are going into something which will be released to the public.
Rather than: The government funded collegiate research will become proprietary to the University of Wisconsin, which will then lease out the rights to dairy producers the patented processes of precisely producing Cream Cheese.
I think I'm find with government funded public domain knowledge. Doesn't appear you are at all. Care to clarify?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Kraft has dominance on the cheese market and has a proprietary formula... some people are trying to make cheese available to everyone. Sounds a lot like the software industry. One company has dominance on the industry, and that company isn't willing to give away what the "ingredients" of the product are. A group of people are trying to make the product "available to anyone".
Open-source cheese isn't a crazy idea. There's already open-source beer.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
As a longtime resdient of the city of brotherly filth, let me just say that the mind just fucking reels at that association.
Did the research include an investigation as to why jalapeno poppers are more addictive than many street drugs?
/. is concerned.
I think that's one of the most important issues regarding cream cheese, at least as far as
Worrying about a few hundred thousand dollars of a seemingly trivial research grant, and possibly ignoring the billions of dollars going into the occupation of Iraq monthly? Makes sense to me.
This is by far the best cheese making page I've ever come across on the net.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
More on this...
Gary Allen reprints a section of the book by Eunice Stamm, The History of Cheesemaking in The Empire State from the Early Dutch Settlers to Modern Times. If you go to http://tinyurl.com/opmbs you will read this:
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the Catskills were just huge tracts of rocky open land that weren't suitable for farming. Farmers often complained that "there were two stones for every dirt" -- but the deforested hills were ideally suited for cow pastures. This, in turn, created the need for a market that could absorb the glut of New York State dairy products. However, with limited refrigeration available, and fears of tuberculosis in the city, fresh milk could not yet be shipped safely in the large volumes that were being produced. Consequently, cheese makers in the region found a ready market for their products. In 1870, Neufchatel was being made in New Jersey for the New York City market, but Charles Green, living in the village of Chester, in the southern Catskills, thought he could do better. In 1872, he hired a European cheese maker to teach him how to make the soft cheese.
What Green didn't know was that another local cheese maker, William A. Lawrence, had overheard the lessons. Lawrence immediately went home and duplicated the recipe -- but doubled the amount of cream. The result was cream cheese, which was packed and shipped from Philadelphia as "Star Brand Cream Cheese." Lawrence also produced and sold "Cow Brand Neufchatel." By the 1880s he had moved his plant west, to Philadelphia, New York.
At the time, Pennsylvania's Philadelphia had a reputation for making fine foods, so the most fashionable marketing name in the United States was "Philadelphia," and in 1885, the Empire Cheese Company in South Edmeston, New York, registered the brand name "Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese." The Empire Cheese Company's factory burned down in 1900, but was rebuilt as "The Phenix" (like the mythical bird that rises from its own ashes every 500 years -- but spelled without an "o"). The company itself was renamed "The Phenix Cheese Corporation" in 1924, but the name didn't last nearly as long as its namesake because Kraft bought the company along with the "Philadelphia" brand name, in 1928.
Today, Kraft is the world's largest producer of cream cheese, and its factory in Lowville, New York, is responsible for 40% of its production. The next largest producer is Breakstone, with its plant in nearby Downsville.
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There you have it. William Lawrence moved to Philadelphia New York to learn how to make cream cheese! OK, so, now, where is Lowville? Well, it's about about 30 minutes down the road from Philadelphia, New York. Surprise, Surprise! When Gary Allen talks about the Catskills being rocky and best suited for Dairy farming he's also talking about the part of New York state where Philadelphia and Lowville are situated, in the St. Lawrence River Valley. All these towns are not in the Catskills, they are in Northern New York, in the area between the Adirondacks and the St. Lawrence River & Lake Ontario. Allen himself doesn't actually say this, but he should have. Another thing - Why in hell would William Lawrence move from the area of Chester, NY, all the way to Northern New York state, to the village & town of Philadelphia, New York? Well, as I explained in my previous post, the people there were already famous for making this same type of cheese by 1870-80! He moved there to learn how - and boy, did he!
Mebbe the people at Kraft think that people would get confused if they printed the truth on their web site, mebbe they just never gave the simple job of learning the truth to any of their researchers - who knows? At any rate, I've just told you much more than you'll learn from Kraft or from Wikipedia. I guess I'll head on over to Wikipedia and replace the myths the people have placed there with the truth when I'm done here.
Gene Mosher