The Good Tasting Bacteria

That is the chuck of good tasting bacteria called Cheese? Cheese is an ancient food that originated before recorded history. There is no conclusive evidence on where cheese making originated, either in Europe, Central Asia or the Middle East. The earliest evidence of cheese-making is some strainers with milk fat molecules were found in Poland that, according to archaeological record, dates back to 5,500 BC. It has been proposed that the origin of cheese making is around 8000 BCE, when sheep were first domesticated. In ancient times, animal skins and inflated internal organs provided storage vessels for a range of food stuff. It is plausible that the process of making cheese was discovered accidentally by storing milk in a container made from the stomach of an animal, resulting in the milk being turned to curd and whey by the rennet from the stomach. Cheeses that were and are produced in Europe, required less salt for preservation and are less acidic than those produced in places like the Middle East. With less salt and acidity, the cheese is an excellent environment for useful microbes and molds, giving aged cheeses their respective flavors. The first factory for the mass production of cheese opened in Switzerland in 1815, but it was in the United States where large-scale production first was very successful. The credit for the large scale of production in the United States usually goes to Jesse Williams, a dairy farmer from Rome, New York, who in 1851 started making cheese in an assembly-line fashion using the milk from neighboring farms. The 1860s saw the beginnings of mass-produced rennet, and by the turn of the century scientists were producing pure microbial cultures. Before then, bacteria in cheese making had come from the environment or from recycling an earlier batch's whey. With the discovery of how to make pure cultures