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The Dairy Down Low

by Nina Budabin McQuown · December 16th, 2008

There comes a time in every food-conscious person’s life when he/she/ze realizes that there’s a little bit of stomach lining in every block of cheese. Who’s stomach lining, you might ask? Well, calf, kid or lamb, with the species of the stomach generally corresponding to the species of the milk.

Why stomach lining is perhaps your next question? In order to make cheese, you need to coagulate or “set” it, that is, separate the curds (solid proteins and fats) from the whey (liquid). Soft cheese is often acid-set with lemon juice or vinegar, which produces a loose, brittle curd, but hard cheeses need something a little more complex.

Enter rennet – every mammal has rennet in its stomach lining to help digest its mother’s milk. The rennet from a young, milk-fed animal’s stomach contains an enzyme called chymosin, which breaks down proteins in milk at a single point in their structure, and makes the resulting particles extremely attractive to one another– the result is the uniform texture of a hard or semi-hard cheese like cheddar or gouda or brie.

Rennet isn’t the only animal product in cheese either. Lipase, an enzyme that hastens the breakdown of fats and enhances flavor, is extracted from animal tongues. Seem kind of like a fundamental violation of that whole don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk injunction? Interestingly, it’s not.

It turns out that what makes cheese kosher or unkosher has little to do with the tiny amount of animal stomach lining or lipase that might or might not be in your cheese and more to do with the hand that added it and mixed it in. According to Kashrut.com, to be kosher, cheese has to be made on kosher equipment by a Jewish person, and the rennet used has to come from a kosher animal killed in a kosher manner. As long as it’s a kosher animal, the tiny amount of rennet used to coagulate cheese (generally the rennet to cheese ratio is something like 1:10,000 or less) is batel, or nullified.

Despite the fact that cheese made with rennet from a kosher animal isn’t unkosher, most kosher cheese is made with microbial or “vegetable rennet”, which is comes from a mold instead of a stomach. Most of what is referred to as “vegetable rennet” then, is more fungal then vegetable. The cheeses at Hawthorn Valley, the wonderful biodynamic farm and dairy that I used to work for, were made with microbial rennet. Microbial rennet is famous for the slight bitterness it adds to cheese, but, as Harold McGee points out in his masterpiece, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, bitterness, ammonia, rot, sulpher, fish, these are the many savors of amino acids, and bare hints of them in combination produce the complex flavors that we love in cheese.

Genetically modified rennet, where fungi, yeasts or bacteria are modified with calf genes to produce two of the many possible kinds of chymosin, is also widely used, particularly in the States. I’ve been unable to find any list of cheeses produced with GM rennet, but according to this site, up to 70% of cheeses produced in the US are made with GM rennet.

Actual vegetable rennet from actual vegetables exists, and some kosher cheeses are even made with it! Veggie rennet isn’t a replacement for animal-derived rennet, it’s an alternate technique that cheese makers have been using for centuries, at least since Roman times. Thistle, nettles, fig and creeping charlie are all common coagulants. Wild cardoon thistle flower, for example, is the coagulant for some Spanish cheeses because of the close biochemical equivalent of chymosin that the thistle flower concentrates in its stigmas. Cheese makers collect the flowers wild, dry them and soak them in warm water, then use them to curdle sheep or goat milk.

If you’re a kosher keeper, you probably know that the rules around cheese are some of the most complex and hard to follow. Any hard or semi-soft cheese (i.e., any cheese made with rennet of any sort or derivation) needs to be made by a Jew in order to be kosher, so just being cultured with thistle flowers doesn’t make for a kosher cheese (though it is pretty cool). To avoid the whole rennet question entirely, you can stick to soft cheeses, which don’t require Jewish supervision as long as they are acid-set.

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7 Responses to “The Dairy Down Low”

Bein Hashmashot Says:
December 16th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
I’m not sure that the cheese has to be processed by a Jew unless you are keeping cholov yisrael.

When I had the rennet conversation with an Orthodox rabbi, he explained to me that kosher cheese used to be made from curdling the milk inside the stomach and what makes it unkosher is when someone takes that rennet from the animal (possibly slaughtering it in an unkosher fashion) and then using the rennet seperately. Nowadays, most kosher cheese makers use vegetable or microbial rennet instead of curdling it inside of an animal stomach since it is cheaper and more practical.

If it had to processed by a Jew, I doubt he would have given me a posek to eat rennetless cheese without a hecture.

The concept of batel bi shishim doesn’t apply if it’s intentional. If a drop of milk accidently falls into a meat stew, it is still kosher, but if you sprinkle cheddar cheese on top of a pot of meat chili, that chili is unkosher (unless it is soy cheese or the meat is seitan!).
JewishGal Says:
December 16th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Actually it’s not hard to make your own cheese! I make my own organic kosher mozzarella using vegetable rennet. You can buy the vegetable rennet online, it’s cheap and it lasts a long time since you only use a teeny bit. With a ~$3 gallon of organic 2% milk I can make 2/3lb cheese in 45 minutes.
Gersh Says:
December 16th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Bein Hashmashot — your rabbi’s position is not the only one. The difference between the special OU Cabot cheddar and the Tablet-K Cabot cheddar is the supervised addition of rennet.
Larry Lennhoff Says:
December 17th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Kosherblog.net has a lot of articles on making kosher cheese at home.

Because of fear that non-Jewish cheesemakers would use rennet derived from a non-kosher or not kosherly slaughtered animal, the rabbis of the Mishnaic era (0-200 CE) enacted the prohibition of gevinat akum or non-Jewish cheese. This prohibition requires that a Shomer Shabbat Jew actually add the rennet to the mixture. The parallel for normal dairy products (milk, butter, etc.) is the prohibition of chalav akum (milk of a non-Jew). This is to prevent a non-Jewish producer from mixing cow’s milk with pig’s milk, camel’s milk, etc.

In the middle of the 20th century Rabbi Moses Feinstein held that American Jews could trust the UDSDA to supervise non-Jewish diary farmers so that cow’s milk remained such. He still advised getting Jewish supervised (chalav yisrael) milk where possible.

He wrote a seperate teshuvah on cheese. There were two major opinions regarding supervision on cheese. One held that it need merely be the same sort of supervision as for chalav yisrael (where a Jew need merely watch, not actually milk the cow) and the other opinion required a Jew to actually add the rennet. Rav Moshe held we should follow the stricter opinion, and the majority of Orthodoxy holds by this position.

There are a few O rabbis who believe we should follow the more lenient opinion. One of them is the rabbi who runs the tablet k supervising organization.

The Conservative movement allows the eating of any USDA certified cheese(*). The two reasons I have seen expressed are firstly that the rennet need not be kosher at all, because it is not edible and has been so processed that it isn’t really a food at all. Secondly, they feel that if we can rely on the USDA for milk we can similarly rely on it for cheese.
ck Says:
December 18th, 2008 at 2:36 am
Sigh. I have a dream. A dream of peace, coexistence and cheese. I always wanted to open up a cheese company. We’d specialize in various goat cheeses and the work force would be made up of Jews, Christians and Muslims. Israelis and Palestinians would work together to produce the regions best cheeses. Economically, the best place to put the factory would be in Nazareth in order to take advantage of advantageously priced real estate and proximity to goats. Naturally, the company would be called “Cheeses of Nazareth.”

I expect we’d do bang up business with American Evangelicals…
Leah Koenig Says:
December 18th, 2008 at 8:12 am
ck – your dream is already being realized in the coffee world!

http://www.mirembekawomera.com/cooperative

though cheeses of nazareth is a way catcher name… :)
Rabbi Shmuel Says:
December 18th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
I believe there actually is a “Cheeses of Nazareth” in Nazareth PA (near the Martin guitar factory)

Do you know the song by the band “The Weight” “I pulled into Nazareth…. it is not some pseudo-religious imagery – they were going to the Martin Guitar Factory!

I have a friend named Nelson Braff – I wanted him to start a blintz business ” The Crepes of Braff”:)