An apparatus for fusing curd provided and comprises a container to receive curd to form a curd stack, which has associated thereto a pressure parameter specifying a pressure required at the bottom of the curd stack to produce a curd block from a bottom portion of the curd stack. The apparatus also comprises a gas pressure system to apply a gas overpressure in the container when a pressure value at the bottom of the curd stack is below the pressure parameter. The gas overpressure has a value equal to or greater than a difference between the pressure required at the bottom of the curd stack and the pressure value at the bottom of the curd stack. A method for fusing curd is also provided and includes applying an overpressure to a curd stack to compensate for insufficient pressure at the bottom of the curd stack.

The present invention relates to compositions and methods for producing continental cheese in a non-wash process.

Cheese that shows a suppressed decrease in texture and/or stretchability of cheese due to heating, may be produced by allowing glucose oxidase, α-glucosidase, transglutaminase, or a combination of such enzymes to act on raw cheese. Cheese analogues improved in meltability and/or stretchability during heating, may be produced by allowing α-glucosidase to act on a mixture containing plant-derived oil and starch, or starch before mixing with plant-derived oil.

Cheese that shows a suppressed decrease in texture and/or stretchability of cheese due to heating, may be produced by allowing glucose oxidase, α-glucosidase, transglutaminase, or a combination of such enzymes to act on raw cheese. Cheese analogues improved in meltability and/or stretchability during heating, may be produced by allowing α-glucosidase to act on a mixture containing plant-derived oil and starch, or starch before mixing with plant-derived oil.

A system to control the conditions of an aging room, also known as a conditioned space, for products in which independent feedback loops control the dry bulb temperature and the dew point while controlling the difference between the vapor pressure in the room and the vapor pressure of the products being dried, thereby controlling the amount of and rate of water or water vapor loss of the products and, therefore controlling its quality, the system also including target controls, a thermoelectric cooler and lighting controls.

The present invention discloses a method for judgment of cheddar cheese grade based on identification characteristic flavor compounds, comprising the following steps: selecting cheddar cheese of different grades as standard product, and extracting volatile flavor compounds from the standard product; using gas phase-sniffing device to screen out characteristic flavor compounds with higher flavor intensity from the volatile flavor compounds through aroma extract dilution analysis; proceeding with clustering of characteristic flavor compounds as screened out to obtain identification characteristic flavor compounds of cheddar cheese; measuring the concentration of identification characteristic flavor composition of cheddar cheese of known grade, and establish the training set for training of support vector machine; measuring the concentration of identification characteristic flavor composition of cheddar cheese to be tested, and inputting it into the support vector machine trained to judge the grade of cheddar cheese to be tested. The present invention aims to obtain the model of identification characteristic flavor compounds of cheddar cheese through statistical analysis, which is available for accurate judgment of cheddar cheese quality grade on this basis.

Disclosed herein is an anticaking agent for cheese, comprising one or more dairy ingredients; and one or more non-dairy ingredients. When applied the anticaking agent is applied to a divided cheese, it has low visibility on the divided cheese, prevents caking of the divided cheese, and browns similarly to divided cheese without the anticaking agent when baked in an impinger oven at between 425° F. and 450° F. for 5 minutes. Also disclosed are food products containing an anticaking agent described herein, and methods for treating divided cheese for anticaking using an anticaking agent described herein.

Deposited Streptococcus thermophilus (ST) strains that e.g. are suitable to be used in an improved method for the manufacture of low browning mozzarella cheese.

Deposited Streptococcus thermophilus (ST) strains that e.g. are suitable to be used in an improved method for the manufacture of low browning mozzarella cheese.

The present invention relates to a method for making cheese of the continental type or the cheddar type, especially reduced-fat or low-fat cheese.