Week 17 – More than you ever wanted to know about cream cheese!

I feel like I owe everyone another blog post since I’ve been slacking so hard lately. That, and it’s currently the 18th week of the year so I’ve got some catching up to do. I haven’t held another cheese night, (again its hard while I’m housesitting) so instead, here is everything you wanted to know about cream cheese (and more!).

I’ve never really thought of cream cheese as an actual cheese (regardless of whether it’s 50% of the name) but, to be fair, I don’t give much thought to a lot of foods; like, why do they call it cottage cheese? Or what’s the actual difference between yogurt and Greek yogurt? For the curious, both answers are simple: Cottage cheese was made in cottages, and Greek yogurt is regular yogurt with the whey strained out, making it firmer and less sugary. A more interesting fun fact is that outside of the US and Britain, Greek yogurt is called ‘strained yogurt’ and isn’t even thought to originate in Greece, but in the Middle East. Anyway, I move away from my point. Cream cheese. This is what’s up.

Hold on to the seat of your pants cause you’re about to get educated.

Cream cheese is a soft, cow’s milk cheese with a high fat content. Unlike other cheeses, cream cheese is not aged and is meant to be eaten fresh. Versions of cream cheese can be found in England as early as 1583, and in France in 1651. Written recipes starting popping up in England and the US in the mid-eighteenth century. By the 1820’s Philadelphia dairy farms had begun to be known as the most consistently high quality producers of this cheese, however, the term ‘cream cheese’ wasn’t used until 1873, when a dairyman named William A. Lawrence purchased a Neufchatel factory and began adding cream to the cheese making process (Neufchatel cheese is one of France’s oldest cheeses, and can be dated back to the 6th century, and is similar to a Camembert). Lawrence began mass producing the first brand of cream cheese in 1877.

From here the history gets a little boring a complicated so here’s a very simplified version: To meet supply demands, Lawrence partnered with a Samuel S. Durland in 1879. By 1880, a New York cheese distributor named Alvah L Reynolds began selling Lawrence and Durland’s cheese, calling it “Philadelphia Cream Cheese”. In 1903, Reynolds sold the Philadelphia brand name to Phenix Cheese Company (and yes, that is how it’s spelled, I double checked) who then merged with Kraft in 1928.

The Internet tells me cream cheese is easy to make at home, although my own cooking prowess is fairly rudimentary, and it gets Alton Brown-y on you pretty quickly. Here’s a ‘simple’ how-to recipe: http://www.culturesforhealth.com/how-to-make-cream-cheese for anyone interested. I’ve talked about the lactic acid process and the use of rennet in previous blogs, both come into play in the cream cheese making process. Here’s my basic understanding:

Molecules in milk have a negative surface charge and keeps the milk in liquid form. The molecules form around particles of fat in the milk and keeping them in emulsion. Lactic acid bacteria is added and the milk is fermented. During fermentation (around 72 degrees Fahrenheit) the pH of the milk drops and becomes more acidic, amino acids of the proteins begin losing their charge and become neutral, causing the liquid to coagulate. However, if the bacteria is left in the milk too long, the pH lowers, giving it a positive charge and the mixture returns to liquid form. SO you have to heat the milk at just the right time and temperature to kill the bacteria; the moment the cheese is at the isoelectric point, meaning the state when half of the amino acids of the proteins are positively charged and half are negative. Get the timing or the temperature wrong and you’re toast.

You got that? Yeah, neither do I. I’ll keep leaving it up to the professionals.

Shout out to JA!