Waxing wheels of cheese. Ross Helen / Canva Pro.
Humans have been making cheese for millennia, and as can be expected, a variety of techniques in the making of it have evolved.
Technical terms have arisen in all languages in order to define and explain the various techniques, so that knowledge can be passed from one cheesemaker to another.
Consumers do not need to know any of these terms in order to buy and enjoy a cheese they like.
However, knowing the terms can help cooks understand how to group cheeses together in their minds, why one group of cheeses acts the way it does when cooked, or stored or aged, and understanding the groups of cheeses allows cooks to more easily make reliable substitutions when necessary.
Most of the terms in the cheese-making industry are fairly self-evident and easy to remember once you see the definition behind them.
Note that not all cheese technical terms have legal meaning. For instance, there are some modern terms tossed around such as “natural” that are more part of the marketing vocabulary than the actual cheesemaker’s vocabulary, and have no legal meaning.
Some cheese technical terms
- Affinage
- Casein
- Cooked-Curd Cheeses
- Creamery
- Double-Cream Cheese
- Fat Content of Cheeses
- Longhorn Cheese
- Pate (of a Cheese)
- Pressed-Curd Cheeses
- Raw Curd Cheeses
- Rennet
- Semi-Cooked Curd Cheeses
- Skim-Milk Cheeses
- Smear-Ripened Cheeses
- Stretched Curd Cheeses
- Sweet Curd Cheeses
- Triple-Cream Cheese
- Truckle
- Turophile
- Washed-Curd Cheeses