How is parmesan cheese made and what is rennet?
There are very few dishes in this world that aren’t improved by the addition of a decent amount of cheese, and the undisputed king of this extra helping of cheese is Parmesan.
It’s as easy to sprinkle over your food as salt, pepper or whichever your chosen powdered condiment is while not overpowering the dish, unless of course you pour mountains of the stuff on.
When you’re buying Parmesan cheese, you’re also paying for the genuine article as there’s a requirement in Europe for only cheese made in certain regions of Italy such as Parma, Reggio Emilia and Modena to call itself Parmesan.
It’s basically along the same lines of the ‘champagne isn’t champagne unless it comes from the Champagne region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling wine’.
While this delicious cheese absolutely flies off the shelves and plenty of kitchens have some to shake atop a meal of whatever dish has just been made, there are some people put off by what actually goes into it.
Yum, yum, yum. Just try not to think about how they make it. Credit: Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald/Getty Images
Parmesan cheese is made from unpasteurised cow’s milk which gets whey added to it, and that’s the liquid that remains after milk has been curdled and strained.
They then heat it up a bit and add something called calf rennet, which is where some people get put off their dining experience.
See, calf rennet is a set of enzymes produced in the stomachs of baby cows, so in your traditionally made Parmesan cheese there’s bits of calf stomach whirling around in there.
It’s put some people off, and frankly it makes you question how the human race invented half of the foods we buy in the first place.
At some point in history somebody decided they were going to milk cows, curdle the milk and make cheese from it and then add calf rennet to the mix.
“Don’t stop sprinkling the Parmesan cheese on my meal until I say you can stop.” Credit: Art Images/Getty Images
While the early days of food science might have been very…
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