What Are the Blue Cheeses?
Warren: So let's put the Canadian ones here. So here, we have a number of blue cheeses. Some of them from across the world and some of them from right here in Canada. I’m going to Hugh tell me a little bit about how do we make blue cheese.
Hugh: Alright, the primary difference between blue cheese and any other cheese is the presence of the molds that’s added early in the cheese making process. It’s one of two different species usually but both of them are type of penicillin. So it's the same penicillin that we’re familiar with from medicine, from pretty much everywhere.
That blue mold that runs through the cheese is what happens when that penicillin is exposed to air on the inside. What happens is the cheese maker will pierce the outside of the cheese with needles to let air into the interior and when it's supposed to oxygen, the molds can grow and ripen on the inside of the cheese. I suppose to most kind of cheese where the outside is what matters.
Warren: So how is the penicillin being added today?
Hugh: Usually today, penicillin is grown and cultured in a laboratory. There’s special food at labs basically that grow the penicillin for cheese makers and then it's added as a spore to the vats when the cheese is first made when the milk is curdled until they run it in the way. It's added shortly after that.
Warren: And traditionally?
Hugh: Traditionally, the cheese, the mold would be coming from caves. In France, Roquefort is still made in the classic caves which are just completely covered in mold along the walls where the mold originated.
Sometimes, the cheese makers would use the mold from loaves of bread that they commissioned that we’re huge loaves of bread full of penicillin mold which would be injected into the cheese.
Nowadays, the molds that are used are usually from a poor scientific refined source.
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