Village Squire, 1975-04, Page 13CHEESE
BY
THE
TON
With the price of cheese these days, and
because of its colour and the solid heaviness
of it, cheese can remind one at times of gold.
So it was a little like seeing the inside of Fort
Knox recently when we visited the Millbank
cheese and butter factory and see cheese by
the ton.
The Millbank plant is one of the most
modern cheese productions in Ontario these
days. It can produce 12,000 pounds of cheese
in a single day, enough to keep you and your
apple pie happy for a good long time. -
Cheesemaker Ken Krotz is a true lover of
cheese. He's up early every morning and sees
tons and tons of cheese made in a year but he
still loves the taste so much that he has
cheese for lunch. He also grabs a handful or
two of curds from each batch just to make
sure it tastes as good as he thinks it should.
The Millbank plant produces cheddar
cheese for four days a week and colby for one.
The daily production of cheddar is 12,000
pounds compared to 9,000 pounds of colby
which doesn't have as large a market.
What's the difference in the two cheeses?
Well, Mr. Krotz explains the colby is made
from pasteurized milk rather than unpasteur-
ized and is softer and milder. It takes about
four hours from setting to final pressing while
the cheddar takes seven hours. The time
difference is in the cheddaring process which
goes into the cheddar cheese. More about
that later.
First let's follow the process from
beginning to end. The milk arrives from local
farms either on bulk trucks or still in the
laborious, time-consuming cans. (The factory
hopes the can delivery will soon be
discontinued since it adds a great deal of
extra manpower).
A worker packs the curds into a box after they are delivered by conveyor belt. Once in the box, the
curds will be pressed to form the cheese, in this case a granular. cheese.
It is cooled and stored in large bulk tanks
until it is ready for the cheesemaking
operation. Then it is piped into a stainless
steel setting tank which is large enough to do
quite nicely as a backyard swimming pool. It
takes a good deal of time just to fill the large
tanks with milk. The milk is heated to 86
degrees before it enters the tank for the
setting process. The setting, or the
coagulating of the milk into curds and whey is
a relatively short process, speeded up by the
use of an acid produced -from a culture, and of
rennet. (Mr. Krotz says less and less rennet is
being used these days because it comes from
calves stomachs and isbecoming hard to get).
When the curd separates from the whey, a
cutter of fine wires, automatically operated
goes up and down the "tank and shreds the
curdled milk into small sections. Steam heat
is passed through the tank and raises the
temperature to 102 degrees F. This drives the
moisture out of the curds and firms them up.
Once the curds are firm, the mixture is
piped out of the tank to another large bin
where the whey is drained off. Here's where
the division comes between colby and
cheddar. The colby cheese is ready for
putting into wooden slab boxes for pressing.
The cheddar, however, goes to the two large
cheddaring machines in the plant. The
Millbank is one of only two plants in Ontario
with such a machine. Cheddaring used to be
done, Mr. Krotz explains, by packing the
curds up along the side of the draining bin
and letting it mat together. Then the cheese
was cut in strips and put through a mill to
create small units: man-made curds, if you
will.
Now, the two cheddaring machines, like
huge kettles, do the same process in less
laborious manner. They mat and drain the
curds and then slowly strip off the matted
curd and feed it into a mill to make the curd.
Mr. Krotz was worried about the effect of the
machines on the taste of the cheese but found
Cans of milk are still received at rhe plant
though most milk is now delivered in bulk.
Here cans are dumped, then steam cleaned
for return to the farm.
VILLAGE SQUIRE/APRIL 19-S 11