Dairy Disagreeables Busy the BacteriologistsHall, Frank H. (Frank Henry)
Science
Dairy Disagreeables Busy the Bacteriologists
Hall, Frank H. (Frank Henry)
Dairy microbiology
Yeasts are plants a little higher in the scale of life than bacteria,
a little larger but still microscopic, and differing from bacteria in
their mode of reproduction, which is by budding of a new cell from
an old one rather than by division of an old cell into two new ones
of equal size. Their most characteristic action is the formation of
alcohol and carbon dioxide; which makes them indispensable in brewing
and bread making.
In good cheeses almost no yeasts were found, but in the sweet-flavored
cheeses sometimes half of the germs present were yeasts; and they were
always found where the sweet flavor was noticed. Yeasts have not been
recognized, hitherto, as a cause for such cheese faults; but their
presence in such numbers cast strong suspicion upon them; which actual
work proved to be well founded, for pronounced cases of sweet flavor
developed in cheeses made from pure milk inoculated with the yeasts;
and the vat in which the cheese was made became contaminated so that,
without further intentional inoculation, sweet-flavored cheese was
produced where none had been known before. As yeasts have hitherto
played minor parts in dairy investigations, no classification of those
found has yet been made, nor has the exact flavor due to each one been
determined. Further study is being given to the subject.
RUSTY SPOT IN CHEDDAR CHEESE.
[Sidenote: =Not a flavor.=]
Rusty spot is not a flavor trouble, as spotted cheeses of this kind
may be all right in taste and smell. The spots, however, are offensive
to the eye and render the cheese salable only at a reduction in price,
if at all. From the Station investigations, continued for nearly two
years, along much the same lines as the flavor studies but with a
little more definite guide in color than in taste and smell, some
direct knowledge has been gained, though not as definite as could be
desired along preventive and remedial lines.
[Sidenote: =Cause and conditions.=]
The rusty spots are colonies of minute plants, bacteria, growing on
the walls of the air spaces within the cheese. The trouble usually
appears in May, often does little harm during the middle of the summer
and generally disappears in October. In cheese made with a high acid
content the moisture content of the air spaces within the cheese is
low, and without abundance of moisture the germs make little growth;
hence the spots are too small to be noticed. The marked influence, on
the germs of rusty spot, of this slight variation in the character
of the cheese probably accounts for the unexpected appearance and
disappearance of the spots from cheeses of an occasional day’s make in
infected factories.
[Sidenote: =Cure.=]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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