Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/12/greed-turned-cheese-bright-ora.html
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But… the fat content of a cheese changes it’s nature considerably.
“Sometimes you feel like a triple-cream, and sometimes ya’ don’t!”
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OK, the natural orange pigment looks like this:
Even traditional gloucester cheese looked like this:
How did neon sell?
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Cursèd are the cheesemakers!
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Yellow is a sign of quality I guess:
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My assumption is that it was gradual over time. They probably didn’t go straight to neon orange. There was probably a long-term “arms race” in terms of orangeness among cheese makers. Someone made theirs slightly more orangey, then someone out-oranged them, so on and so forth.
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Mimolette is serious (i.e. expensive and delicious) cheese that’s also orange. But the colour comes from annatto added for seasoning and to distinguish the cheese from Edam, of which it was originally a clone.
Not a picture of a cantaloupe:
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Annatto seems to be a very common cheese oranger.
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True story:
I personally made green butter once:
It began as an attempt to make whipped cream from a half-pint of heavy cream, a thing I had watched my mother do a couple of times.
To provide some context, I was eleven, and was making a birthday cake for her.
In my hubris, I decided to lightly sweeten the whipped cream, so I added some sugar, and to tint it green (see context note above as to why I would consider this desirable) so I added some green food coloring.
I added quite a bit too much of both.
Even with the mixer turned to high, the desired whipping effect never materialized, instead the liquid clotted and congealed into a deep green mess.
Fortunately, I did not discard the disaster, but saved it in a bowl in the 'fridge. My mother was grateful for her birthday cake, even without whipped cream to augment it.
Having grown up on a farm herself, she immediately understood what I had done, and demonstrated that one can rinse butter in cool water.
My family enjoyed sweetened butter as a spread for toast for several days, and the light green tint that remained was considered merely an amusing quirk.
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Well, obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.
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There was a time when Suffolk cheese was considered so bad that the Royal Navy gave up trying to feed it to sailors. This was because the farms in Suffolk were close enough to London that the cream could be shipped to London, so the cheese made there was “flet cheese” made from skim milk. https://ageofsail.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/navy-cheese/
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Cool!
“Suffolk Cheese” is going to be my new metaphor for…something.
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Loved spending the summer holidays in Drogheda and turning the churn was a chore but the food was just unforgettable, and yet so simple!
Locally slaughtered meat, fresh spuds and vegetables out of the field, sieved and chilled milk (Unpasteurised), full cream butter with just the right amount of salt added.
I feel sorry for the young that have never tasted real food and hate some of the crap food we’re forced to put up with.
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(For those who didn’t catch the reference.)
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We got dinged by a technical judge once for adding too much annatto to our cheese. The catch is, we don’t add any. But it’s pretty much standard industry practice nowadays, and Jerseys aren’t as popular a breed in the US as they might have been fifty years ago. When you’re paid on shipped volume, you go for the highest-volume producer cow – a Holstein. When you optimize for cheese production, you want the highest possible protein and butterfat content*. We’ve been playing with genetics for ages, and Jerseys produce stupidly high-fat milk. Like, 6.25% at the end of a season, if memory serves.
Back in the day of milk bottles being delivered to your porch, you could tell high quality milk by the layer of fat that had separated and sat at the top of the bottle. You won’t get that with Holstein milk (well, to be fair, homogenization pretty much kills that in any milk).
Of course, our cheese looks like this:
*Gross oversimplification. What we were looking for was actually a specific proportion of protein to butterfat. We used to have to skim fat off the vat because there was too much of it. Had to adjust the herd genetics to fix the balance. Water content was actually a negative, since milk to cheese yields are somewhere below 15%. Frequently below 9% for large-scale operations. All that extra water is just taking up space in your cheese vat.
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Well this is cool. The cheese pictured in the NPR article is made about 2 miles from my house. My kids won’t touch processed cheese since they basically grew up on this kind of sharp cheddar, and they do like the extra sharp too, none of that wimpy mild stuff. I guess that’s what happens when they can’t read but can reach up to the sample counter and grab something. Oh, and the smoked cheddar, yummmmm.
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Awesome, I remember being able to buy green top milk in our area, direct from the farms and so, so much cream at the top and if you didn’t shake it , a bit sickly to be honest.
For sixty years or so they’ve (The medical profession) have been telling us that fat is bad for us and now suddenly they’ve changed they’re mind, it’s complex sugars instead like corn syrup the shit they can’t get rid of without putting it into everything they can as a sweetener.
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Greed turned cheese bright orange
Get that tRump cheese while it lasts!
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Laura liked the churning days best of all. Churning meant making butter out of the cream that came from Sukey, the cow. In winter, the cream was not as yellow as it was in summer. That meant the butter was white and not so pretty. Ma liked everything on her table to be pretty, so during the winter months she colored the butter.
First she put the cream in a tall pot called a churn. She set the churn near the stove to warm. Then she washed and scraped a long orange-colored carrot. She grated the carrot on the bottom of the old, leaky tin pan. Pa had punched the pan full of nailholes for her. Ma grated the carrot by rubbing it across the roughness until she rubbed it all through the holes. When she lifted up the pan, there was a soft, juicy mound of grated carrot.
Ma put the mound of carrot in a little pan of milk on the stove. When the milk and carrot mixture was hot, she poured it into a cloth bag. Then she squeezed the bright-yellow milk into the churn so that it colored all the cream. Now the butter would be yellow.
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