Making gourmet cheese involves science, art, and a little bit of luck. The basics of cheesemaking are well known, as cheese is a biproduct of milk processing. Knowing when a cheese is at its prime for consumption, however, is the art of cheesemaking and it can take a lifetime to perfect. Cheese has been around for about 8,000 years, and back then, sheep were integral to the process because they have an enzyme in their stomach called rennet which is critical to the cheesemaking process. Sheep stomachs were used to store milk, and the thinking is that the exposure of the milk to the rennet in the sheep’s stomach produced the first cheese.
Since then, the cheese-making process has improved significantly. A cheese from the French village of Normandy, Camembert is a distinctive cheese made from cow’s milk. It is soft, creamy, and surface-ripened. True Camembert, “Camembert de Normandie” is made from unpasteurized milk, but a lot of today’s cheesemakers use pasteurized milk. Camembert is made by adding bacteria and rennet to warm cow’s milk and then separate the curds and whey and put the curd into molds. Then, a mold-like penicillin is sprayed on the surface to start the ripening of the cheese. This is where the magic happens, and the guessing begins.
For Camembert cheese, it is all about the ripening, and the process is not an uncomplicated one. It involves biochemical reactions and microbiological changes to transform a hard, crumbly cheese not something soft and smooth. Ripening begins on the surface and extends inward. Legally, Camembert has to be ripened for at least three weeks, but knowing when it’s perfectly ripened is the tricky part.
Scientists think that chromatography might be able to help unlock the mystery of the ripening process. Researchers used solid-phase extraction and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS-SPE) to investigate the compounds in the cheese that are responsible for the ripening. The research is still in the early phases, but it is possible that science could help unlock some of the mysteries of cheese.