The Molecular Secrets of Cream Cheese 211
Roland Piquepaille writes "The June issue of Wired Magazine carries a story about one of the two university labs in the U.S. dedicated to cream cheese research. This one is -- where else? -- in Madison, Wisconsin, where researchers are exploring the molecular mysteries of cream cheese. You may not know, but this cheese is tricky to produce because the acid-secreting bacteria used to coagulate the milk need to be killed at the right time. The researchers are now writing a guidebook about the secrets of cream cheese, a book which will be available to anyone, in a process similar to the open source movement for software. For more information, please read the entertaining article of Wired magazine, 'Schmear Campaign' or this summary to discover little-known facts about cream cheese."
Wonderful (Score:3, Funny)
I am so glad that tax dollars extorted from me are being spent on such important projects. Thanks Uncle Sam!
Re:Wonderful (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Funny)
We cannot have a cream cheese/lox molecular secrets gap at taxpayer expense.
KFG
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Funny)
if it makes the food supply cheaper/more reliable (Score:2)
Re:if it makes the food supply cheaper/more reliab (Score:2)
Re:if it makes the food supply cheaper/more reliab (Score:2)
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
What sets us apart from the apes is our drive to seek knowledge purely for the sake of knowing it. What sets the US apart from many other nations is our willingness to fund science in all its forms, whether or not a given research projects produces something whose value can be measured in dollars and cents.
Re:Wonderful (Score:2, Insightful)
Just had to correct that little typo.
Re:Wonderful (Score:2)
Re:Wonderful (Score:2)
I think Dr. Cornelius [wikipedia.org] would take exception to that remark!
Re:Wonderful (Score:2)
Re:Wonderful (Score:2)
Oh wait, that food was funded by money stolen from the American taxpayers. Oh woe is me, I'm a poor fat A
Re:Wonderful (Score:2)
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, WTF? When has learning anything about organic chemistry prove useful?
Re:Wonderful (Score:3, Funny)
Other than the typo, that's exactly what I said to my parents after I failed Organic Chemistry last semester.
Re:Wonderful (Score:2)
Troll? (Score:2, Insightful)
I am so glad that tax dollars extorted from me are being spent on such important projects. Thanks Uncle Sam!
I wonder if you meant this in humour and were completely overlooking the Open Source bias of slashdot.
Here's another way to look at it:
The government funds are going into something which will be released to the public.
Rather than: The government funded collegiate research will become pro
Re:Troll? (Score:2)
Re:Troll? (Score:2)
You've been repeating this line over and over again throughout this thread, as if Slashdot has never heard a hardcore libertarian talking point before.
We get it. You're a hardcore libertarian. Interstate highways, most scientific research, and farm subsidies are all Very Bad Things. Yes. We understand. You can stop harping on it already.
Re:Security Through Obscurity Fails Yet Again (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Security Through Obscurity Fails Yet Again (Score:2)
Re:Security Through Obscurity Fails Yet Again (Score:2)
Even if it did not succeed in doing this, the war in Iraq was supposed to preserve the safety of the American people, which is the government's duty. Cream cheese research is not even supposedly necessary to preserve our rights.
Re:Wonderful (Score:2)
I guess I missed the announcement where they figured out the important things like a cure for [choose N: AIDS, breast cancer, heart disease, pancreatic cancer, SIDS...].
Instead of pork barrel, we need a cream cheese brick.
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wonderful (Score:2)
Re:Wonderful (Score:2)
Re:Wonderful (Score:2)
Maybe if I had an espresso, I would have had the energy to google it first...but then I'd have needed a bunch of cream cheese.
I can't imagine what an espresso and a bunch of cream chee
Re:Wonderful (Score:2)
If your "opposites" theory is correct, nothing (if adequately and proportionately mixed).
Re:Wonderful (Score:2)
I'm glad that at least the info will be public for all citizens to access, that's how ALL taxpayer-funded projects SHOULD be, whether it's a design for a new screw or nut to bleeding-edge aerospace technology. If US citizens were forced to spend money on something, it belongs to
Strangely, (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah. Truly bizarre.
Re:Strangely, (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Strangely, (Score:2, Informative)
Pubmed brings up 45 hits on "Cream cheese".
Most relevant is probably "Characterization of Particles in Cream Cheese" [fass.org] (M. R. Sainani, H. K. Vyas and P. S. Tong - J. Dairy Sci. 87:2854-2863).
Nondairy cheeses a bigger challenge (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nondairy cheeses a bigger challenge (Score:1, Flamebait)
And eat that damn burger. There's kids starving in Japan damnit and you're going to turn your nose up at an American delicacy. For shame.
Re:Nondairy cheeses a bigger challenge (Score:3, Funny)
I knew Steve Jobs was reading Slashdot, but I didn't realize he was posting!
Hi, Mr. Jobs!
Re:Nondairy cheeses a bigger challenge (Score:2, Funny)
Why not just eat your raw carrots and celery, and forget about the fake meat?
Re:Nondairy cheeses a bigger challenge (Score:2)
Re:Nondairy cheeses a bigger challenge (Score:2)
Re:Nondairy cheeses a bigger challenge (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll grant you ice cream. That's pretty good. I'll even grant you the milk substitutes as they can be good drinks in their own right (even if they taste nothing like milk), but I have never had a vegan hot dog that I could swallow the second bite of. Smart Dogs, Quorn Dogs, etc. are all just utterly horrible tasting.
*sigh* I long for a vegetarian substitute for bacon
Please don't RTFA! (Score:2, Funny)
I read them, but I'd like to request that no one else read them. If we all read the article then the "little-known facts" become well-known, and therefore less valuable.
Thanks.
Open Source Cream Cheese, yeah Cheese is the word. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Open Source Cream Cheese, yeah Cheese is the wo (Score:2)
or, Honk if you love Cheeses!
Make your own mascarpone! (Score:4, Informative)
Heat one quart of light cream (I mix two cups of whipping cream with two cups of whole milk) in a double-boiler to 180 degrees F. After five minutes, pour in two tablespoons of freshly-squeezed lemon juice. Lit it sit at 180F for 30 minutes. Take off the heat, and let it cool, covered, in the refrigerator overnight.
The next day, arrange a sterilized (by boiling) teatowel over another container, and pour the curds and whey into it. Tie up the towel, and suspend it using a skewer over a tall container, like a pitcher. Let it sit in the fridge for 24 hours, dripping away.
The next day, the teatowel will contain yummy mascarpone cheese! Use within about a week to ten days of making it.
I've done this several of times, with excellent results.
Great cheese page (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Make your own mascarpone! (Score:4, Informative)
Ricotta is italian for "recooked". Ricotta cheese is made by recooking the leftover whey of a previous batch of cheese, helping the remaining milk protein in there to clog together. This recooking, as you may notice, does not happen in the submitted recipe.
This is one of the wonderful things about cheese: although the ingredients and basic procedure are mostly the same, variations in the preparation method lead to dramatically different cheeses.
Re:Make your own mascarpone! (Score:3, Informative)
For example, change a few steps and you have Panir, a Persian cheese that tastes and looks a bit like fetta. That recipe calls for you to use regular milk, lime juice, retain the whey, and store the resulting compressed churd block back in the whey with a little salt.
re: CHEESE (Score:2)
thanks slashdot community for making me hungry with
your incessant cheese chatter.
Re:Make your own mascarpone! (Score:2)
Re:Make your own mascarpone! (Score:2)
Re:Make your own mascarpone! (Score:2)
Acids and heat are what coagulate protein. Coagulated proteins are what make cheese. When you use a culture, you are introducing bacteria to the milk that convert sugars to acids, along with dozens or hundreds of other compounds, which will then coagulate the proteins, along with cooking the milk. Rennet, another important cheese-making ingredient, is an enzyme that makes the curds larger and harder, thus making it easier to get more whey out of the way.
The bacterial culture you use
Re:Make your own mascarpone! (Score:2)
Re:Make your own mascarpone! (Score:2)
As a former Wisconsonite... (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, I back all agricultural research. Food will become the next major world commodity (aside from fuel). It's easy to make potable water, but trying to compensate year after year of lackluster arable ground is foolish. The United States is one, if not the, top contender for arable land and our rank will only increase as the floodplains of the Asian countries are flooded with ocean water with rising sea levels. Seven billion people have to eat somehow.
Re:As a former Wisconsonite... (Score:2)
Besides, I bac
Madison Wisconsin (Score:4, Funny)
and the other one is in -- let me guess -- Philadelphia?
I believe he meant Philadelphia brand cream cheese (Score:3, Informative)
As a longtime resdient of the city of brotherly filth, let me just say that the mind just fucking reels at that association.
Re:I believe he meant Philadelphia brand cream che (Score:2, Informative)
Gary Allen reprints a section of the book by Eunice Stamm, The History of Cheesemaking in The Empire State from the Early Dutch Settlers to Modern Times. If you go to http://tinyurl.com/opmbs [tinyurl.com] you will read this:
-------------
the Catskills were just huge tracts of rocky open land that weren't suitable for farming. Farmers often complained that "there were two stones for every dirt" -- but the deforested hills were ideally suited for cow pastures. This, in turn, created the need for a market th
Re:I believe he meant Philadelphia brand cream che (Score:2)
Well, if you read the webpage a bit more carefully, you'd have noticed that it says that cream cheese was in fact invented in Chester, NY, and not Philadelphia. Not that is isn't a corporate myth, but at least criticise the actual statement's content.
Why you get mod points for directing everyone to the Kraft web site and I don't get any for passing on my own direct knowledge of what really happ
Re:Philadelphia (Score:2)
Combing food and Interesting science (Score:2, Funny)
http://nakedip.com/ [nakedip.com] -- revolutionary web 2.0 site
mmm (Score:5, Funny)
I'm think I'm in love.
Re:mmm (Score:2)
Laugh all you want (Score:4, Interesting)
mmmmmm... cheesecake
Re:fetacheese (Score:2)
I grew up near Kraft... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I grew up near Kraft... (Score:2)
Re:I grew up near Kraft... (Score:2)
Old Fashion Organic Cream Cheese (Score:5, Informative)
On the subject of cheese, the distinctions between things like soured, curdled milk, sour cream, cream cheese, mascarpone, and full-fledged cheese are myriad and arcane. I wrote a quick blurb for a friend, explaining what cheese exactly is. I have attached it below, for your perusal. IAACE (I am a cheese expert)...
Re:Old Fashion Organic Cream Cheese (Score:2)
Thanks for bringing this up.
Open-source cheese vs. proprietary cheese (Score:2, Interesting)
Kraft has dominance on the cheese market and has a proprietary formula... some people are trying to make cheese available to everyone. Sounds a lot like the software industry. One company has dominance on the industry, and tha
Simiar to Open Source? (Score:2, Insightful)
Jalapeno poppers (Score:3, Funny)
I think that's one of the most important issues regarding cream cheese, at least as far as
OK I waited long enough (Score:2)
Cheeese (Score:2)
Open Source (Score:2)
I've tried to get answers out of food-industry associations before. Forget it unless you want to join, which sometimes requires proof of corporate activity, and always requires a hefty fee.
So if this "available to everyone in the industry" thing isn't "free to everyone," Kraft will get the secrets that fill out their copious internal data, but you won't learn how to break off a big chunk of hteir market sha
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:2)
Did you mean that wage growth has exceeded inflation? On occasion, especially in the last few years, they haven't. Over the long term, though, wages have far exceeded most measures of inflation. This is why there is a debate about whether to weight future Social Security benefits on inflation rather than on wages, as it currently is (see this [urban.org], for example).
I love statistics (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:2)
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:2)
1. Nutrition plays a huge roll in infant and child health. I would suspect that along with medicine, the availability of cheap, nutritious food has helped to lower child death rates.
2. Even if you only look at Life Expectance at age 65, the US has been continuously improving for the last 100 years, and certainly has been higher than the four score and ten that you mention. any n
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:3, Interesting)
Quite true. Even as recently as the advent of the social security system in 1935, the average life expectancy of the working male was considerably under the 65 years of age set as "retirement" when they passed the Social Security Act. They weren't actually expecting most people to live long enough to draw benefits from
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:2)
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:2)
Don't forget to take your daily "life extension" pill every morning!
That's funny, you know, I and my family have on average a lot longer life-span than 30 years, yet we just survive on clean water, food and air.
But maybe I gotta grab some pills and swallow them, just in case I might die otherwise.
Seriously: don't forget a large portion of the health problems we suffer today are because of o
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:4, Insightful)
Not even close. The use of synthetic pesticides disqualifies an item from being organic. Some of the pesticides that they were spraying on your food 20 years ago are now banned because they were found to be unsafe.
They'll probably end up banning some of the current genetic modifications if and when they find problems with it, but that doesn't mean that 20th century agriculture was especially safe. (And prior to the 20th century, there were major health risks in the food supply from natural causes like bacterial contamination. There has never been a safe food utopia.)
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:1)
I now see in my grocery store "organic milk", it is priced twice as expensive as the gallon of regular milk. The same thing is in produce, they have organic vegitables. What is this? 20 years ago everything was organic, now only the rich can get normal food. The rest of us must eat crap that has been genetically modified.
Ra-men, brother. "Food" for the masses is
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:1)
R.H.
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:3)
It's possible that the OP remembers cheese before it became the plastic-wrapped flavourless, dead, waxy stuff that fills the aisles of supermarkets today.
As for Wisconsin or cream cheese, I know I'm not at all interested in technological advances. The last time I had real (fresh, non-pasteurised and and unadulterated) milk or cream was on a farm, and that fa
Pasteurization sucks, here's why (Score:2)
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:2)
You're probably thinking about 120 years ago, and back then only the rich could get any food. Remember, grapes used to be an expensive luxury of the wealthy.
20 years ago was 1986, and food
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:2)
Re:Science gone amuck again (Score:5, Insightful)
Really you couldn't be more wrong. They may not have called themselves scientists, but farmers have been selecting crop products basesd on traits for millenia. Do you know what we call corn now looked like before domestication? It's thought to have been derived from teosinte [wikipedia.org]. We've been engineering foods for thousdands and thousands of years. You find one kernel on the plant, grow a few, look for the ones with 2 kernels, and so on. Hell, breadfruit which is found throughout polynesia and micronesia used to reproduce sexually. The current plants are now pretty much all derived from parts of a few original plants and they now rarely, if ever, produce any seeds. To imply that genetic engineering is new is pure and utter garbage. We're simply doing it in a more directed manner now with better tools. Will there be unseen health effects? Sure! In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there are recalls on crops down the line. Is what we're doing now any less natural, I don't think so.
Re:Slashdot hacked (Score:2)
Re:Not that hard? (Score:3)
Though indeed helpful to restore normal bacterial populations for those with yeast infections, yoghurt is good all around to keep you healthy. The nutrients yoghurt contains -- while beneficial -- are actually not the most important part. Most beneficial are in fact the live cultures found in many yoghurts. I.E: Just finished off a prescription of antibiotics, did you? Well, the odds are very good that it negatively impacted the microorganisms in your GI tract - to speed your recovery by restoring a natu