Issued on: 08/01/2023 – 02:46
Galax (United States) (AFP) – With its brown-and-white cows grazing on a grassy hillside high in the Appalachian Mountains, Meadow Creek Dairy is not like most other American cheesemakers: its products are made from unpasteurized, or “raw” milk.
The small family business in the eastern United States is a rarity in the nation’s dairy market, dominated by industrial cheesemakers exclusively using pasteurized milk.
In their blue overalls and caps, Helen Feete and Ana Arguello work before huge vats, each containing hundreds of gallons of milk.
Feete, who founded the dairy with her husband in the 1990s, told AFP that when they started out “there weren’t any models for us to follow” — few small dairy farms were trying to make cheese from raw milk.
Methods viewed as traditional in Europe — even the source of regional pride — are seen as nearly taboo on the other side of the Atlantic.
The essential difference is that pasteurized milk has to be heated — to 63 degrees centigrade (150 Fahrenheit) for 30 minutes, or 72 degrees centigrade (162 Fahrenheit) for 15 seconds.
That kills the microflora in the milk, which has a major impact on flavor — and not for the better, say partisans of the raw-milk approach.
There is “a complexity of flavor and a uniqueness of flavor… that is only possible when the milk is unpasteurized,” said Liz Thorpe, an American author of books on cheese.
60 days’ aging
Detractors of unpasteurized cheeses, on the other hand, say there is a higher risk of bacteria and microbes in raw milk, which can cause potentially lethal diseases such as salmonella and listeriosis.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires the “mandatory pasteurization for all milk and…
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