Making Cheese

Andalusia boasts a wealth of traditional cheese recipes used to produce a wide variety of artisan cheeses guaranteed to delight the senses. Nevertheless, regardless of milk type and place of origin, they all involve a series of standard procedures that are outlined below:

Preparing the milk

 
When the milk is brought to the cheese factory from the cattle farm, it is subjected to a series of chemical and microbiological analyses to guarantee its initial quality. It then undergoes a series of processes that will prepare it for the subsequent stages of production.

In this phase, the milk is filtered and/or disinfected to ensure that any impurities that might have been transmitted to it during milking are eliminated. It is then stored in refrigeration tanks at 4ºC.

Those companies which produce cheeses made from pasteurised milk expose it to temperatures in excess of 70ºC for several seconds.


Curdling

Once the milk has been poured into the curdling vat, lactic ferments are added. These are bacteria that play a key role in the subsequent maturing of the cheese. Also added at this stage is the rennet which, depending on the type of cheese being made, may be vegetable, animal or microbial, and it is this ingredient that brings about the curdling process. In physical terms, it precipitates the casein micelles to form a gel that also retains globules of fat, water and salts.