Forbes looks into a year-long study hoping to determine exactly what it is that makes cheddar cheese taste like cheddar and not gouda or Swiss or some other kind of cheese. The secret is in the interactions of microbes, of course:
To address the secrets of the flavor of Cheddar cheese, the study’s lead author, microbial ecologist Chrats Melkonian, a postdoc at Utrecht University and Wageningen University, collaborated with the study’s senior author, microbiologist Ahmad Zeidan, R&D Director of Systems Biology and the Bioinformatics & Modeling Department at Chr. Hansen A/S, a global food science company. Dr Melkonian investigates the governing principles behind microbial community assembly, and Dr Zeidan’s main research interest is bridging the gap between computational biology and industrial biotechnology.
“Here, we studied the roles of microbial interactions in flavour formation in a year-long Cheddar cheese making process, using a commercial starter culture containing Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactococcus strains,” the team write in their paper.
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The research team discovered that both bacteria species under investigation had important roles, but Streptococcus thermophilus was especially important.
“S. thermophilus has a crucial role in boosting Lactococcus growth and shaping flavour compound profile,” the authors noted in their study.
“While S. thermophilus had a large contribution to the flavour profile, Lactococcus cremoris also played a role by limiting diacetyl and acetoin formation, which otherwise results in an off flavour when in excess.”
When L. cremoris was removed from the starter culture, four flavor compounds could be detected. These included 2,3-pentanedione (which gives the flavor of nuts, cream, and butter), along with heptanal and hexanal (fruity and fatty flavors). But when L. cremoris was present, another set of flavor compounds could be detected in higher amounts, particularly 2-methyl-3-thiolanone (a meaty flavor) as well as the esters, ethyl acetate and ethyl hexanoate (fruity flavors), according to the study authors.
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Deciphering the particular contribution that each bacterial strain makes to the final flavor of a cheese is complex because of the multitude of biochemical reactions that each microbe strain carries out. Further, cheese flavor depends on the interactions between the many microbes present, which represents an important consideration for future applications — and will perhaps even help scientists design cheese microbiomes to improve existing cheeses as well as to develop new ones.
The authors point out that more experiments and research are needed, but they anticipate that in the future “artificial intelligence can be used to predict which organisms and in what quantities can produce desirable flavors.”
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You can read more of the cheese research here, in Nature Communications.