Cheese and Other Cultured Dairy Products

Historically, cheese was essentially a means of preserving milk. By the time this was no longer a necessary method of storage, a wide variety of cheeses had found their way into the culinary landscape. Cheeses are categorized in two broad groupings: fresh or unripened, and aged or ripened. No matter the type, all cheeses are created by shaping curdled milk through a variety of methods. Within each grouping, there are huge numbers of subdivisions that classify a specific cheese by its texture, terroir (the place from which it originated), the mechanics of its manufacture, the ripening process, and many other delineations. A classification may be altered by the aging process, too; a young, unripened cheese is an entirely different entity from the same cheese a few weeks later, when it has fully matured.