Stirring the cheese

Heating, stirring, pressing, turning, bathing - and waiting. Cheesemaking is a very delicate art; every stage of the process counts for the final taste, from the kind of grass eaten by the cows which give the milk, to the way it is stored - and indeed, the way it is served up to be eaten. This is roughly how it goes:

High quality
Switzerland prides itself on putting quality first, and cheese is no exception. Swiss cows eat grass in summer and hay in winter. No silage and no additives for them if their milk is to be made into cheese. The milk has to be delivered to the cheese factory within 12 hours of milking, otherwise it is regarded as too old. A large proportion of Swiss cheese is made with unpasteurised milk, an additional reason to treat it as soon as possible after milking. Not surprisingly, most cheesemaking enterprises are out in the villages, so the milk does not have to travel too far. Cheese is also still made up in the mountains by herdsmen during the summer months.

One gallon of milk for one pound of cheese
The first stage in cheesemaking is to heat the milk in a vat or cauldron to 32 degrees (90 degrees F), stirring constantly. Once it has reached the required temperature, rennet - taken from the stomach lining of calves - and a fermentation culture is added and the stirring stops. These ingredients act to coagulate the milk, turning it into a jelly-like mass of curds. This is then simultaneously cut up and stirred with a "cheese harp" - so called because it is strung with wires like the musical instrument. This separates out the whey, and reduces the rest to granules, no bigger than grains of maize. The mixture is heated during this process, in order to get rid of the liquid. The size of the granules determines the type of cheese: the larger they are, and the more liquid remains, the softer the final cheese.

A good cheese requires the temperature to be exactly right at all these stages. It's the mark of a skilled cheesemaker that he (or she) knows just when the mass is ready for the next operation. In the days when cheese was made in a huge cauldron over an open fire, this wasn't easy. For centuries the cauldron used to be hung from a swivelling pole so that it could easily be removed from the heat. This system is still used today up in the mountains. But in the 19th century an ingenious device replaced it: the "fire wagon." The fire was laid not in the fireplace, but in a container which ran on rails. The heat could be much better used, since when not needed for the cheese, the wagon was pushed under a second cauldron to provide the hot water vital to keep all the equipment spotlessly clean.

The granules produced by the harp are put in a mould, and pressed in order to get rid of more liquid. It's at this stage that the wheels of cheese receive their identifying mark, which enables every one to be traced back to its manufacturer. After about a day the cheese is removed from the mould, and immersed in a salt bath, the recipe for which is a closely guarded secret, since it is this brine which first gives the cheese its particular aroma. A soft cheese remains in the bath for about two hours, while an extra hard variety can stay for up to 72. This is also when the rind begins to form.

It takes about 10 litres of milk to make one kilogramme of cheese, or roughly one gallon for one pound.