The Rural Voice, 1983-01, Page 16Hoopinq
Pressing
PG. 16 THE RURAL VOICE, JANUARY 1983
crops have been planted in the fields.
"We can dispose of the whey on land as
we don't pollute the streams, but it takes
a lot of land." said Frehner. "Some local
farmers would come to pick it up, but it
has to be shipped right away, and
farmers often don't have anything to draw
it away in."
In the United States, all milk is
pasteurized before cheese is made.
According to Harley, there is no genuine
aged cheddar in the U.S. "Process
cheese is made, and then mustard seed,
other condiments, and organic acids are
added. These are all natural foods, but
they don't make cheddar." In fact, a quick
perusal of cheese labels at Ontario
groceries will reveal that some cheeses
"may contain spices".
Technological advances have also
contributed to the decline in the quality
of traditional cheddar cheese. In larger
cheese factories, such as the one in
Millbank. Ontario, cheese is made on a
production line. Up to 185,000 pounds of
milk is made into cheese daily; only up to
18,000 pounds was used daily at Maple-
ton. Although the cheesemaking process
is carefully monitored by cheesemakers
at the larger factories, every vat of milk
must take the same length of time at
each step of the process. "That machine
goes by time," said Bridgeman. "You
can't hold it back because the next vat is
coming along behind. You can't wait for
the milk to get to the right stage. This is
the sad part of mechanization. Costs are
so high that cheese factories now have to
run on volume and low production costs.
When you do this, quality suffers.
Automation will never produce quality; it
just isn't there."
In the United States, New Zealand, and
Australia, a programmed cheesemaking
device called Chedd-a-matic is used to
produce cheddar. Dials on a large control
panel are set to guide three 20,000 pound
vats of pasteurized milk from the
beginning to the end of the cheese -
making process, with a minimum of
manpower.
The large factories can do ten times
the volume of cheese in a day than we
could do in a month, said Bridgeman,
"but automation doesn't think." He
believes that there will never be a good
aged cheddar once pasteurized milk must
be used to make it, but he concedes that
"there may be something close to it."
Research is being conducted on enzymes
extracted from sheep and goats; these
enzymes, added to the milk after it has
been pasteurized, have been producing
with some success the sharp, tangy
flavour found in raw milk cheddar. "But
this scientific control is expensive, he
said. "They've been keeping strict re-
cords, but I think it's going to be
hit-and-miss for a few years yet."
The attitude of the young cheesemaker