It’s not mold, it’s calcium lactate (2018)

https://www.thephcheese.com/theres-white-stuff-growing-on-your-cheese-that-isnt-mold

by ilikepi • 1 year ago

409 222 1 year ago

Generally speaking, calcium lactate will be found on the outside of a cheese (usually a cheddar), and tyrosine or leucine crystals will be on the inside. Calcium lactate can also form on the inside of cheese, but tyrosine and leucine crystals cannot.

... Cannot form on the outside, presumably.

borski6• 1 year ago

Correct.

geetee3• 1 year ago

How long until cheese makers start adding the crunchy crystals to give the appearance of quality without the actual quality?

borski6• 1 year ago

Aside from cheddar (or similar), the crystals are always inside the cheese, so the appearance is nearly the same as those without the crystals.

geetee3• 1 year ago

Sure, replace "appearance" with "impression" for a more accurate representation of my intent.

IneffablePigeon• 1 year ago

This happens already, at least it does in the UK. Most cheaper brands of “extra mature” supermarket cheddar have added crystals. I don’t actually mind that much - I do think it is a genuinely slightly more enjoyable product with the crystals.

geetee3• 1 year ago

Is this something they disclose on the packaging? I'm curious how to identify this in the cheese I buy.

_qg83• 1 year ago

There are also fake ways of accelerating aging to create this effect, like the Old Amsterdam cheeses you’ll find in the Netherlands. That particular brand has a lot of fake qualities to it that creates these effects.

borski6• 1 year ago

Visited Gouda in the Netherlands and learned this. Best cheese I’ve ever had.

jajko• 1 year ago

Old aged gouda is the best cheese I ever laid on my tongue. We live in Switzerland next to French border, so there is no end to universe of fine aged original Gruyeres, Beaufort or even Cheddar (but that one probably worse than what one can get in UK), plus all AOC Italian ones. Simply hard cheeses with grain, there are hundreds to choose from.

I love them all, but that gouda taste is something else to me and my wife. French shops just around the border luckily import some of it, I never saw it in Switzerland shops.

One way to upmark any cheese for us to put ie black truffles or wild black garlic in it.

Talking about gouda, gotta get me some slices before kids munch it all again.

borski6• 1 year ago

Same, tbh. I love cheese. But that aged Gouda is absolutely memorable. I can literally taste it now haha

goosejuice4• 1 year ago

L'amuse will blow the mind. One of the best cheeses out there and I've had hundreds.

Chällerhocker is another great one in your neck of the woods.

clmul• 1 year ago

People in the Netherlands are usually not at all proud of their cuisine, but the cheese is definitely a nice aspect (as someone who eats the >1 year ripened stuff almost daily)

Although for me some of the French cheeses are the best. Just what you're used to I guess :D

twic• 1 year ago

Have you tried Mimolette? It has a similar character to those very old Goudas.

dfxm12• 1 year ago

I think when someone thinks of the Platonic ideal orange cheese, they taste aged gouda on their tongue.

kirtakat• 1 year ago

It's funny how as soon as I read to Netherlands, my brain back-tracked to correct me on the pronunciation.

If anyone else is ever in the Netherlands and has a chance, due the tour in Gouda, it's delightful and you get to try a bunch of gouda cheese!

borski6• 1 year ago

I hate that I can’t say the word without saying it right, but that means that everyone else thinks I’m saying it wrong. Haha

Agreed btw, the tour in Gouda is wonderful. Show up for the morning when they have the cheese market; it’s a really fun time.

emmelaich• 1 year ago

It's Ghowda right? The gh like in argh and the ow in brown.

shrubble• 1 year ago

Costco sells the Coastal cheddar which has a lot of this kind of crystals.

stevenwoo3• 1 year ago

The Kirkland blocks of sharp cheddar can also have these on the outside.

xattt2• 1 year ago

Tangential, but I recently noticed that natamycin, an antifungal agent, is being used in packages of shredded cheese as a preservative.

I was a little taken aback on seeing it, given that antibiotic stewardship has been pushed so much in the last decade.

I realize that natamycin is an antifungal and not an antibiotic, and that mechanisms of developing resistance are likely different between eukaryotes and prokaryotes. However, I’m still somewhat concerned what long-term low-level exposure will mean.

hart_russell• 1 year ago

"True, fungi cannot survive if its host's internal temperature is over 94 degrees," says Neuman. "Currently, there are no reasons for fungi to evolve to withstand higher temperatures. But what if that were to change? What if, for instance, the world were to get slightly warmer? Now there is reason to evolve."

ronyeh2• 1 year ago

Thanks for reminding me to rewatch it before the new season comes out (soon).

fhdkweig• 1 year ago

Fungi can grow inside the body. A man who was used to injecting heroin decided to try magic mushrooms. So, he expected the high to be better if he injected them too.

https://www.livescience.com/magic-mushroom-injection-case-re...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/man-injects-magic-mushrooms-...

robocat4• 1 year ago

Google. "systemic mycoses" or "mycosis internal organs". It isn't just the {lungs, skin, mouth, throat, urinary tract} that can grow molds or yeasts.

A few related medical words: Cryptococcal meningitis, Mucormycosis, Blastomycosis, Histoplasmosis.

Hopefully your brain is warmer than 34°C - perhaps avoid trusting zombie HBO shows for medical knowledge.

I'm guessing they were riffing on the zombie-ant fungus: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis

cmrdporcupine2• 1 year ago

Now you have me wondering if natamycin could be useful as an anti-fungal pesticide in my vineyard/orchard :-)

throwway120385• 1 year ago

It might not be good for the fungi in the tree roots.

0_____04• 1 year ago

Tangent on tangent - in addition to the antifungal there is also anticaking agent (nothing crazy, often some type of flour) that noticeably changes the mouthfeel of cheeses that come pre-shredded. If you notice a grainy texture in your food, try grating it off a brick instead!

xattt2• 1 year ago

I have been shredding my own for a while, since it's typically cheaper. It just happened to be that I was feeling lazy one particular day and bags of shredded cheese were on sale.

kadoban4• 1 year ago

Yeah, especially for things like cheese sauces I find that it's better to just grate it yourself. It will _not_ melt correctly otherwise, and the additives mess with sauces more than you'd think.

astura2• 1 year ago

People are super religious about this but I've never been able to tell pre-shredded cheese from cheese I've shredded myself and I don't think anyone else can tell the difference in a blind taste test.

wahnfrieden4• 1 year ago

it's wood pulp. sawdust derivative. aka cellulose.

don't buy pre-shredded cheese unless you like replacing up to 10% of your cheese with essentially sawdust at a premium.

https://www.eater.com/2016/3/3/11153876/cheese-wood-pulp-cel...

CGMthrowaway2• 1 year ago

Anti-caking agent can be either cellulose ("sawdust"), potato starch, or calcium sulfate

CGMthrowaway2• 1 year ago

Natamycin was discovered in 1955 has been widely used as a food preservative ever since.

Especially cheese and bread, but also fruit, meat and peanuts.

Typically adds between 1 week and 1 month of shelf life to products in the typical doses

GloamingNiblets• 1 year ago

Given our developing understanding of the importance of the human microbiome, which includes fungi (the mycobiome), I steer clear of anti fungal preservatives in my food personally.

Just because something has been used since 1955 doesn't mean it's all good.

almosthere• 1 year ago

If you look, you can still find shredded cheeses without this, but it's usually pretty rare now.

nobody9999• 1 year ago

If you look, you can still find shredded cheeses without this, but it's usually pretty rare now.

You're quite correct. Thankfully, my local has me covered with that![0][1]

The stuff without preservatives definitely doesn't last as long, but the difference in taste/texture makes all the difference.

[0] https://shop.wmarketnyc.com/s/1000-1052/i/INV-1000-87892

[1] https://shop.wmarketnyc.com/s/1000-1052/i/INV-1000-89151

Edit: Fixed link formatting.

hettygreen• 1 year ago

All the more reason to Make America Grate Again..

I'm here all night folks.

foxyv8• 1 year ago

Cheesy jokes on Hacker News? I approve.

matheusmoreira• 1 year ago

Antifungal resistance is actually a thing. Fungi can evolve or acquire resistance mechanisms against antifungals, just like bacteria and antibiotics.

Arguably it's an even bigger problem than antibiotic resistance: fungi are eukaryotes, just like us, and in practice this means we have less chemical weapons to fight them with. Losing the relatively small arsenal we have would be quite bothersome to say the least.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5587015/

foxyv8• 1 year ago

I stopped buying pre-shredded cheese a decade ago. Block cheese is cheaper, lasts longer, and cooks better. Pre-shredded is just worse in every way aside from convenience. Using a cheap rotary grater like they have in restaurants makes this almost a non-issue.

m463• 1 year ago

anything shelf-stable, hydrogenated peanut butter, highly processed milk, etc

I'm starting to wonder if

  convenience = 1/healthy

hopefully not bananas though.

tshaddox• 1 year ago

Isn't the convenient version of something always worse in every way aside from convenience than the less convenient version of the same thing?

Animats• 1 year ago

Block cheese is cheaper, lasts longer, and cooks better.

Is this a promotion for the National Cheese Stockpile?[1] The US has about 1.5 billion pounds of cheese in storage in a cave in Missouri. Really. There's a USDA welfare program for dairy farmers, and they have to put the excess milk somewhere. So it's made into cheese and stored.

[1] https://modernfarmer.com/2022/05/cheese-caves-missouri/

niemandhier• 1 year ago

Obligatory reference to the excellent book: The Science of Cheese by Michael H. Tunick.

This book is an in depth scientific introduction to, exactly, cheese. A great read, you can feel the passion the man has for his work!

stevenwoo3• 1 year ago

I'm now kind of upset at myself that I have thrown out perfectly good Cheddar in the past due to white spots.

sphars• 1 year ago

I actually did this yesterday to a block of cheese and now I regret it

coldpie• 1 year ago

For firm & hard cheeses, the bad molds very rarely penetrate the surface. If you get some questionable looking mold on the outer surface, you can cut off the outer couple of mm and enjoy the remainder just fine. For rustic/home made cheeses, handling the "bad" mold on the outer surface is a normal part of the aging process before it makes it to the customer anyway. https://cheesemaking.com/blogs/learn/how-to-bandaging-chedda...

zahlman2• 1 year ago

The USDA says to cut off at least an inch and be careful not to cut through mold: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and...

tacitusarc• 1 year ago

No, that is most likely mold. Not all white spots are positive, especially if they are on old cheese in the fridge (as per the article).

stevenwoo3• 1 year ago

It does give a method of testing at home at the end, though, with hard being crystal and soft being mold.

GuB-422• 1 year ago

Even if it is mold, just remove it off the surface. It doesn't penetrate far on hard cheeses like Gouda.

Also the reason why I don't buy pre-grated cheese, it doesn't age well. It also tends to be lower quality to begin with.

ahartmetz3• 1 year ago

Also, if you get bright white(!) spots on cheese like Brie (which is made with white fungus), it's usually just the cheese "reactivating". You - theoretically - don't even need to cut off anything.

kjkjadksj3• 1 year ago

I’ve eaten brie weeks after sell by date. It just turns into a firmer cheese by then no striking difference in taste really.

GuB-422• 1 year ago

I remember having a brie-like cheese cut in half and left forgotten in the fridge for more than a month. The mold had reformed completely, as if it they were made like this in the first place.

It tasted fine, no one got sick. Kind of underwhelming to be honest, but it wasn't particularly tasty to begin with: industrial cheese, pasteurized milk. It fact, that it still had some life in it surprised me.

dekhn5• 1 year ago

Cheese crystals are umami. Many of them are glutamate crystals. I am curious if the other amino crystals have a similar flavor profile.

jsbg• 1 year ago

In the sense that they contribute to umami taste, yes. But most commonly the nucleotides inosinate (from meat and fish) and guanylate (from dried mushrooms) are the other molecules that provide umami flavors.

facile32324• 1 year ago

Also MSG, obviously.

rbrownmh• 1 year ago

The umami flavor of cheese, especially hard cheeses, is incredibly under appreciated. And I'll never understand the popularity of pre-shredded cheese...

frereubu• 1 year ago

Me either, but a relative who worked in processed foods told me the reason it exists isn't just lazy consumers, it's made from the oddly-shaped (by supermarket standards) offcuts that they can't sell otherwise.

dekhn5• 1 year ago

Umami is a lot more present that people recognize. I've built up an intuition for this over the years, and also sort of trained my tongue.

What we call umami is a subjective experience that has an underlying molecular cause, but it's complicated: more than one molecule contributes to the sensation, different foods have different molecules, many people can't recognize it on its own, etc.

The most easily recognized umami tastes seem to come from hydrolyzed soy protein and yeast extracts- both are added to tons of food. The canonical example is Doritos, which are a masterpiece of modern food industrial optimization. Doritos are mostly corn, but they also add whey (cheese derived umami), MSG (molecular, isolated glutamate in salt form), buttermilk (multiple flavors including umami), romano cheese (more umami!), tomato powder (umami), inositate (umami). It's basically an umami bomb.

From what I can tell, the best umami flavors come from a combination of several different molecules combined with some salt. the combination seems to potentiate the flavor significantly. You can also saturate out your receptors- if you drink a highly concentrated broth, you'll see there's some upper limit to the amount of umami you can taste and after that, additional aminos are just wasted.

Cthulhu_3• 1 year ago

I'll never understand the popularity of pre-shredded cheese...

If spending too much time in eve online taught me anything, it's that convenience is worth money. People are inherently lazy, and there's plenty of ways to exploit that.

The next level of pre-grated cheese is frozen pizza, for example.

WillPostForFood• 1 year ago

I’ve always loved the crunch in a good Gouda, and it’s really fun to read some details about tyrosine crystals that cause it.

jinushaun• 1 year ago

Like adding acid to fake sourdough…

7speter• 1 year ago

Was proud I planned out buying a couple of pounds of cheddar from the supermarket and keeping it in our spare fridge for a year and had aged cheddar for Thanksgiving baked mac and cheese last November.

floren• 1 year ago

If you're ever in Pullman, Washington, stop in at the WSU dairy store and get a few cans of Cougar Gold cheddar. Cheese in a can sounds weird, but it's delicious, made by the students, and it ages really well -- I've got some cans in my fridge which are coming up on a decade old now. It's kind of a waste to use an aged can for mac and cheese, but I used part of a younger can for mac & cheese and it came out beautifully.

psunavy03• 1 year ago

As a Penn State grad I feel like WSU and PSU need to have a creamery-off for charity or something.

globular-toast2• 1 year ago

Whenever I keep mild or medium cheddar too long it goes "mature" before long, but it doesn't taste good. French cheese, on the other hand, matures (affines) quite nicely at home.

talkingtab2• 1 year ago

It seems wrong to me that most of what people now call cheese is not at all like what I think of as "real cheese". I have ended up making cheese and it is both fascinating, productive and tasty. While there are many "recipes" for cheeses, they are mainly focused on preparing the cheese for aging. These are often techniques, like washing the curd (gouda) or cheddaring (cheddar).

The aging part takes more work. I converted a 7.5 CU refrigerator using an Inkbird temp controller. That works surprisingly well. Currently I'm attempting to improve the humidity control with a humidity version of the Inkbird.

But highly recommended. I have everything I made (even the failures) with the exception of one of the first attempts.

anamexis2• 1 year ago

What do you think of as "real cheese"?

talkingtab2• 1 year ago

In Europe, and at gourmet cheese stores, you get a slice from a wheel. It is alive, in the sense that it has not been "treated" to increase shelf life. A wheel of cheese is like a little biome or green house or garden in a bottle. The rind of the cheese is the wall. It allows the cheese to breathe, but in a way that preserves the life inside it. Once the wheel is cut, the bottle is broken, and while the cheese can be kept for a time, it will start to degrade. The humidity (~80-85 %) is important so the cheese does not dry out and it does not become a nice home for unwanted mold, bacteria and fungus. The temp of ~55 F is also important so that the little things can live but don't start over growing.

If it comes from a wheel where it was aged, almost any cheese is good - depending on your particular taste. The aged ones with crystals are great, especially Dutch ones, but "local" cheese is almost always wonderful.

I was in Colby, Wisconsin a couple of times and I found the local Colby cheese to be good. Many locally made cheese are good, but again if they are bagged in plastic then they do not compare with the "real" thing.

eric-hu• 1 year ago

Thank you for sharing your experience!

This is something I’ve been curious about. Can you speak more about how you got into it? What kind of research did you do before getting started? Did you know anyone else who had done it before you got into it?

xandrius• 1 year ago

These "most" people might be country specific.

I make cheese myself (both fresh and year-long aged ones) and virtually all the people I met knew what real cheese was.

If it is the "ultra-processed" cheese what you are referring to, that might not be liked by some but that's still cheese, regardless of its plastic-y feel.

khazhoux• 1 year ago

It seems wrong to me that most of what people now call cheese is not at all like what I think of as "real cheese"

Not sure at all what you’re referring to. Surely it’s not “american cheese”, which has been the punchline of obvious cheese jokes for decades. Or the powder in mac & cheese boxes, which is its own thing.

From where I stand, I see grocery stores in the USA stocking large varieties of cheddars, fontina, gouda… all “real cheese.”

globular-toast2• 1 year ago

In the USA the main problem is everything has to be pasteurised which rules out many "real" cheeses like camembert.

brundolf• 1 year ago

Until early adulthood the only cheese I really knew was kraft slices, kraft parmesan powder, bags of pre-shredded, etc. Literally buying cheese by the block turned my world upside down

dekhn5• 1 year ago

There's a whole concept of "farmer's cheese"- quickly prepared from pressing whey, minimal preservation- intended for nearly immediate consumption. Cottage cheese, queso fresco, paneer, ricotta, are all examples... then of course you have brined cheeses... feta, etc...

Tade02• 1 year ago

I spent a couple of months in Switzerland for a project and supermarkets there often have this booth that me and my friends referred to as the "Kingdom of Cheese".

The Kingdom of Cheese is a climate-controlled enclave with just cheese - the person there is happy to help you decide because they know you'll be back eventually as indeed the products there have those crystals.

EA-3167• 1 year ago

Back eventually? I'd personally set up a little tent in the foyer and live there year 'round, like an increasingly portly mouse.

throwaway889900• 1 year ago

At that point just call it Redwall Abbey!

Tade02• 1 year ago

I would do the same, but that is a particularly expensive diet.

derelicta• 1 year ago

Oh my! I do miss these kingdoms of cheese myself! No offence to the British but they don't know what good cheese is :p

ndsipa_pomu• 1 year ago

That's fighting talk round my way!

I submit to you that you've not tried the good British cheeses such as a Baron Bigod (Norfolk Brie), a nettle covered Cornish Yarg, the well-named Stinking Bishop, the rolled-in-ashes Kidderton Ash, Yoredale, Yarlington, Stilton, Beauvale, Gorwydd Caerphilly, Driftwood, Pevensey Blue, Witheridge in Hay, Ailsa Craig ...

NikkiA• 1 year ago

This thread makes me realise I must be the only person on earth that detests the taste of the crystals.

crossroadsguy• 1 year ago

And that I am the person who discards it trying not to hold with bare fingers whenever anything starts growing on any food item including cheese (which is a rare usage thing for me anyway; or maybe in my region; we use different kinds of cheese though, mostly consumed fresh).

It’s not mold, it’s calcium lactate (2018)

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