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Microbes Make Low Fat Cheese Taste Better

© Neal Rolfe Chamberlain

I like fat. Fat makes our foods taste so good. Unfortunately, fat is not good for us. Too much and those arteries start to clog. If those arteries happen to be the ones that supply our hearts (coronary arteries) with oxygen a heart attack can quickly occur. Thousands of operations occur each year to bypass those clogged arteries. One way to keep coronary arteries open and serving up oxygen is to avoid food rich in the very thing that makes it taste so good: FAT.

As as result of this knowledge many people are eating low fat foods of all sorts. Unfortunately, low fat foods taste sort of strange. I remember in vivid detail my first taste of low fat salad dressing. It had this sort of sweet, bitter, grainy, taste I just couldn't get over.

The same problems occurs when cheese makers produce low fat cheese. Low fat cheese is bitter and lacks the buttery texture people from the United States have grown to love. Past researchers have found that consumers in the United States preferred nonbitter, milky, and buttery tastes which are characteristic of young Cheddar cheese. Further research has revealed that as the bacteria ferment the milk to cheese off flavors and bitter tasting substances are produced by the bacteria. When there is higher amounts of fat in the milk the fat will adsorb the unpleasant flavors and we don't taste these nasty tasting byproducts. This is one of the reasons fat in cheese makes it taste better. Unfortunately, when low fat milk is used to make cheese the nasty tasting byproducts are not absorbed out of the cheese and it tastes bitter and less buttery.

However, all is not lost. Researchers at the University of Minnesota (Howard Morris et. al.) used their knowledge of cheese making bacteria to create a more palatable low fat cheese. They realized that the bacteria in the cheese while fermenting the milk would produce these bitter tastes. To get around this they chose 3 different bacteria from the ones normally used in making cheese. One of the strains Lactobacillus lactis subspecies Cremoris SK11 produces a cheese that is free of the bitterness. It does this by destroying the bitter tasting byproducts  that occur in the cheese. The second bacterial strain Lactobacillus lactis subspecies lactis biovar, diacetylactis produces a lot of diacetyl, acetoin, and acetate. Diacetyl is thought to be an essential component of Cheddar cheese flavor (buttery) and may improve flavor quality at elevated concentrations. A similar flavor compound is acetoin. It has a mild creamy, butter-like flavor, slightly sweet like mild cheese and tends to reduce the harshness of diacetyl. Diacetyl combined with acetoin

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