General video · Level C1 - Part 2

How It's Made Blue Stilton Cheese

Stilton is a creamy and crumbly British blue cheese whose roots date back to the early 1700s.

Level: C1 · 56 sentences

Transcript

Stilton is a creamy and crumbly British blue cheese whose roots date back to the early 1700s.
It tastes mellower and less salty than many other varieties of blue cheese.
Always produced in an 18 pound cylinder format,
it has veins of blue mold radiating from the center outward.
The production of stilton is strictly regulated.
Only half a dozen dairies in the world located in three specific English counties are licensed to produce it
and only from locally produced pasteurized milk.
It takes 20 gallons of milk to make each 18-pound cylinder of stilton.
They begin by pouring milk in a vat.
Next, they add starter culture - laboratory-grown natural organisms.
Then they mix a blue mold culture called Penicillium roqueforti with distilled water
and add this to the milk as well.
After about three hours, they stir in rennet - enzymes that coagulate the milk fat.
After about 90 minutes, workers run a wire knife through the now gelatinous milk,
separating the fat called curds from the liquid called whey.
Then overnight, they drain the whey out of the bottom of the vat.
The next morning, the firm curds go through a mill which breaks them up into a crumbly consistency.
Workers weigh out portions of 24 pounds.
Each of which will become an 18 pound cylinder of cheese.
After adding salt (the company won't disclose just how much), two workers gently hand mix the portion.
Two different mixing styles blending the ingredients more thoroughly than one.
Then, they funnel each portion into a cylindrical plastic cheese mold called a hoop.
The curds still contain whey, so workers stack the hoops for five days.
Typically cheeses are pressed to drain the whey, not stilton.
Here, gravity does the job.
The cheese drains under its own weight.
Workers flip the hoop once daily to drain through both the top and bottom.
After five days, they remove the hoop.
The cheese now dryer stands on its own.
While with a knife, they perform a critical procedure called rubbing up.
They rub the entire surface with a flat blade sealing all the holes
so that air can't penetrate and cause premature internal mold growth.
Now, the cheese goes onto a stillage, a type of trolley,
and begins its journey through the climate-controlled blueing rooms
named for the color of the internal mold growth which occurs there.
Workers flip the cheese daily to prevent its cylindrical shape from distorting under its own weight.
Within a week to 10 days, grayish white sometimes orange naturally occurring mold begins growing on the outside.
And from that point on, when the cheese acquires a certain amount of mold,
they move it to the next level room then to the next one and so on.
At about the five week mark, they mount the cheese on the turntable of a piercing machine.
With each press of a foot pedal, the turntable rotates slightly
and long stainless steel needles pierce the cheese.
These tiny holes permit oxygen to enter
and kick start the Penicillium roqueforti blue mold culture that the dairy put in the milk earlier on.
Before long, blue mold gradually grows from the center of the cheese outward.
To monitor the extent of the blue mold growth,
the dairies cheese graders draw samples using a tool called a cheese iron.
The iron reaches all the way to the core of the cylinder.
When the sample shows that the bluing runs right through, the cheese is ready, more or less.
The timing's actually a bit tricky.
Stilton is a relatively young cheese, best eaten between 12 and 14 weeks.
The dairy does its best to coordinate shipping
so that the cheese is at its optimum quality when it reaches the customer.
Therefore, it ships eight or nine week old cheese to local stores
and seven week old cheese to international customers
so that the blue stilton will be an ideal eight or nine weeks of age when it arrives at its destination.