Welcome to Thursday Things! This week, a Thursday Things special investigation. It’s in your refrigerator, it’s on your sandwiches, it’s hanging out with your macaroni — but how well do you really know cheddar cheese?
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Do you recognize any of these cheese slices? Number 3? Okay, grab him, boys! Photo by Önder Örtel on Unsplash
Cheese Mystery
This week we present a Thursday Things special investigation into one of the world’s great mysteries: WHY IS CHEDDAR CHEESE ORANGE?
Often the items we present here at Thursday Things are articles or websites that turned up in the news or in my various online feeds due to whatever algorithms put things on my screen. Sometimes they are incidental to a project I am working on — planning a trip, research for a book, looking up some personal finance or automotive, or housekeeping question (Often laundry related. I still to this day have no idea what “permanent press” means.)
But the origin of this week’s special investigation is different — I was eating some cheese and crackers a few days ago and I suddenly wondered for the first time in my life why cheddar cheese is orange.
It’s made of milk. Shouldn’t it be white? Most cheese is some shade of white or cream, maybe pale yellow. Blue cheese has blue bits in it because of the Penicillium roqueforti mold injected during the cheesemaking process. Yet even blue cheese isn’t blue all the way through.
But the wedge of cheddar cheese I was about to consume was uniformly orange.
Why?
Yes, there is white cheddar. But most cheddar cheese I’ve ever eaten is orange. And I never questioned it. I just ate it. All my life.
Existential crisis.
There was only one thing to do: To the Internet!
Welcome to Cheddar
As a preliminary step in our investigation, let’s dig into the origin of cheddar cheese. Never mind the color, why is it called cheddar cheese ?
The answer to that question can be found in merry olde England, specifically county Somerset in southwest England. And more specifically, the village of … Cheddar.
The village of Cheddar, England, is an easily overlooked pit stop with picturesque gorges, historic caves, and the one and only Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company, a storefront with samples, provisions, and gifts from the production and aging facility on site. Purchase modestly priced tickets inside for a self-guided tour through the back door where you can see what makes cheddar, cheddar.1
Cheddar is where Cheddar cheese began. Many famous cheeses are named for their place of origin. Cheddar cheese was first produced in the 12th century, and quickly gained a prestigious following:
After English nobles got word of the cheese, it became a necessity at many royal banquets. In fact, King Henry II purchased more than 10,000 pounds of cheddar in 1107, declaring it the best cheese in Britain. Henry’s son, Prince John, continued to serve cheddar cheese during royal affairs.2
Cheddar, cheddared, cheddaring
But cheddar cheese is different for another reason too. Because “cheddar” is not just a place name. It’s also a verb!
From Encyclopedia Britannica:
In the traditional method of cheddar manufacture, the firm curd is cut, or “cheddared,” into small bits to drain the whey and then pressed firmly into cylinders commonly of 12 to 15 inches (30 to 38 cm) in diameter and weighing from 60 to 75 pounds (27 to 34 kg), though size may vary widely. The cheese, a light orange-yellow in colour, is wrapped in thin muslin and coated with wax. It is aged a minimum of three to six months, preferably one and one-half to two years.
Here is a little more detail on the cheddaring process, from Ecoffier online:
At this point, cheddar takes a turn away from many other cheeses. Cheesemakers form the curds into blocks and then stack them on top of each other to allow excess whey to drain. By restacking and turning the blocks over time, all of the curds are able to dry out equally. This stacking and drying process is known as cheddaring.
This cheddaring process was a major innovation in cheesemaking:
A Brief History of Cheddar Cheese
The history of cheddar is the story of the transformation of our food supply. Over the past hundred and fifty years, cheddar cheese, once a regional specialty, has become one of the world's most widely produced dairy products.
I recommend the full article, but the gist is that the cheddaring process led to a cheese well-suited for mass production:
Cheddar is especially well-suited to mass production, industrialization, storage, and travel.
… In the mid-19th Century, cheddar became the most widely produced cheese in the US, and so it remained for 150 years.
… As food production shifted from the farm to the factory, cheddar was poised to be the “it cheese”. Essentially every step made to improve it either increased yields or improved its stability for shipping and storage before the ubiquity of refrigeration.
Starting in the mid-1800s, a series of technological and scientific improvements were introduced to adapt the already hearty cheddar cheese to fit into industrializing food production, propelling it into its current popularity.
Well, that all explains why cheddar cheese became one of the most widely produced cheeses in the world. But we still don’t know why it’s (often) orange!
The caves of Cheddar
Before we get to that, I want to go back to Cheddar the village and note something I learned in the course of this investigation: Cheese caves exist!
The caves are a natural store system. All cheesemakers try to emulate what the cave does," Shepherd said of the storage method that began long before refrigeration. These caves were formed 500,000 years ago, with the first mention of the cheese here dating to 1170, when King Henry II purchased more than 10,000 pounds.The type was officially named cheddar in 1500.
"We store our cheese in the middle of the cave system — it's prime location, really," Shepherd explained. "It's not too close to the floor; it's near the roof of the caves so there's not going to be any water damage if the caves flood.
I definitely want to tour the cheese caves of Cheddar. I’m sure they’re regular caves with rounds of aging cheddar cheese stored on shelves. But in my mind they look more like this:
Cheese cave! Image: ChatGPT/Dall-E
Orange you glad you read this far?
Okay, time to solve the mystery. It turns out that the secret of the orange color of Cheddar cheese has to do with the cows and the grass they ate.
Several centuries ago, English cheesemakers produced cheese with a yellow tone thanks to the milk from certain cows. These cows, often Jersey and Guernsey breeds, ate a lot of grass that was packed with beta-carotene, which gave the milk an orange-yellow tone.
Original cheddar cheese was orange for the same reason carrots are orange — beta-carotene. That makes sense. But what about today’s cheddar cheese? Orange-colored cheddar cheese is produced all around the world. It’s not all made in Cheddar and it’s not all made from the milk of fancy beta-carotene grazing Guernsey cows.
That’s where the fraud comes in.
Remember, although cheddar cheese is commonplace today, back in olden times it was a high class cheese, beloved of nobility and fit for the king’s banquet table. Naturally, unscrupulous cheesemakers wanted to cash in on the cheddar craze. The orange hue of cheddar was a mark of high class cheese. So how to make your low class cheese orange and charge more for it?
Dye!
That hue came to be a marker of high-quality cheese, which meant that producers of lower-quality, lower-fat cheese learned to game the system by adding pigment from saffron, marigold, and carrot juice.3
Presto! Now you’re selling “cheddar” cheese, fresh off the cheese wagon from, er, Cheddar.
These days, I don’t think most cheddar cheese buyers think they’re getting any kind special fancy cheese from the supermarket cheese counter. So why is cheddar cheese still dyed orange?
Expectation. Over the centuries, people expected cheddar cheese to be orange, so cheesemakers dye their cheddar orange to meet that expectation. These days the cheddar is not dyed with carrot or marigold juice but with annatto.
Nowadays, people mostly use annatto, a food coloring made from the achiote tree, which gives it that orange hue we look for. The idea is not to change the flavor of the cheese at all, but to make the color more of what history has told us to expect.4
Orange cheddar, however, seem to be primarily an American fixation:
Over time, the colour orange became associated with cheese itself, which explains why American cheese—and also cheese snacks like Cheetos—are orange, too.
In addition, if you were to go to a European supermarket, you would find that all of their Cheddar is white, not orange. North America just seems to have this infatuation with orange Cheddar!5
Now you know.
This concludes our Thursday Things special investigation.
And now .. to the cheese cave!
Thank you for reading!
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