Cheddar cheese flavour

The production of sulphur compounds is believed to be very important in the development of Cheddar cheese flavour. Residual sulphydryl oxidase activity may play a role in initially reoxidizing sulphydryl groups exposed upon heating cheesemilk the sulphydryl groups thus protected may be reformed during the ripening process. 

Manning, D. J. (1979a). Cheddar cheese flavour studies. II. Relative flavour contributions of individual volatile components, J. Dairy Res. 46, 523-529. 

McGugan, W. A., Emmons, D. B., and Larmond, E. (1979). Influence of volatile and nonvolatile fractions on intensity of Cheddar cheese flavour. J. Dairy Sci. 62, 398-403. 

Enzymes derived from the stomach of suckling calves and lambs have been found to be largely responsible for the development of characteristic flavours of Italian cheese. The properties of these enzymes (Richardson and Nelson, 1967) and the chemic nature of their activities have been studied. The development of the goaty flavour of Italian cheese, for example, is attributed to the production of low molecular weight fatty acids in milk fat, presumably induced by fat lipolysis. The production of cheese flavour components such as diacetyls and acetoin is facilitated by esterases (Magee et al., 1981). Present day cheese manufacturing practices involve the addition of external esterases to augment the production of the desired flavours. Enzyme modified cheese products are employed to fortify or intensity cheddar cheese flavour in some formulations. 

Many cheeses contain the same or similar compounds but at different concentrations and proportions chromatograms of some cheese varieties are shown in Figure 10.25. The principal classes of components present are aldehydes, ketones, acids, amines, lactones, esters, hydrocarbons and sulphur compounds the latter, e.g. H2S, methanethiol (CH3SH), dimethyl sulphide (H3C-S-CH3) and dimethyl disulphide (H3C-S-S-CH3), are considered to be particularly important in Cheddar cheese. The biogenesis of flavour compounds has been reviewed by Fox et al. (1993, 1996a) and Fox, Singh and McSweeney (1995). 

Cliffe, A. J., Marks, J. D., and Mulholland, F. (1993). Isolation and characterization of nonvolatile flavours from cheese. Peptide profile of flavour fractions from Cheddar cheese determined by reverse-phase high performance liquid chromatography. Int Dairy J. 3, 379-387,... 

McGarry, A., Law, J., Coffey, A., Daly, C., Fox, P. F., and Fitzgerald, G. F. (1994). Effect of genetically modifying the lactococcal proteolytic system on ripening and flavour development in Cheddar cheese. Appl Environ. Microbiol 60, 4226-4233. 

Sood, V. K. and Kosikowski, F. V., Ripening changes and flavour development in microbial enzyme treated cheddar cheese slurry, J. Food ScL, 44,1690, 1979. 

Lamparsky, D., I. Klimes, Cheddar cheese flavor its formation in light of new analytical results, in Flavour 81, P. Schreier, Ed., deGrayter, Berlin, 1981, p. 557. Berger, R.G., Aroma Biotechnology, Springer, Berlin, 1995, p. 240. 

While rennet-coagulated cheese curd may be consumed immediately after manufacture (and a little is), it is rather flavourless and rubbery. Consequently, rennet-coagulated cheeses are ripened (matured) for a period ranging from about 3 weeks for Mozzarella to more than 2 years for Parmesan and extra-mature Cheddar. During this period, a very complex series of biological, biochemical and chemical reactions occur through which the characteristic flavour compounds are produced and the texture altered. 

---