The Manufacture of Cheddar Cheese from Pasteurized Milk

Although pasteurization has been adopted almost universally in this country for market milk, the process has been used to only a limited extent in cheesemaking even though its advantages have been established by experimental work. As long ago as 1912, Sammis and Bruhn (4), in summarizing the results of work done at the University of Wisconsin in cooperation with the United States Department of Agriculture, stated that with pasteurized milk they obtained improvement in quality and more uniformity in the cheese, that the yield of cheese was increased, that there was less need for cold storage, and that the making process could be systematized to such an extent that it would be conducted on a fixed time schedule. More recently Marquardt (1) reported that pasteurization produced a slight but distinct improvement in the quality of experimental cheese. Price (3) confirmed the earlier results of Sammis and Bruhn, and added the significant observation that, while pasteurization is more effective when the qualtiy of the milk is inferior, the quality of cheese made from pasteurized milk varies with the quality of the raw milk. Phillips (2) also demonstrated that pasteurization makes the cheese more uniform and results in greater improvement when the raw milk is of poor quality or tends to be gassy. Stevenson (5) reported that pasteurization has been adopted generally by the cheese industry of New Zealand and it "has been an unqualified success."