: Controlling Processed Cheese Functionality
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: Innovations in Dairy



Executive Summary
P rocessed cheese and related products are extremely versatile foods that can be customized with a wide variety of flavor, texture and cooking attributes to appeal to most consumer segments. Because of their long-term stability, tailor-made functionality and availability in convenient sizes and packaging (e.g., as slices precut for sandwiches and hamburgers), processed cheeses in both their cold and heated forms are popular with fast food and other foodservice sectors as well as in the home. This special report discusses how the interactions among cheese, emulsifying salts and processing conditions (temperature, time and shear) can be manipulated to create products with targeted textural, cooking and flavor properties. The ability to better control the melt, textural and flavor characteristics should expand the market potential of processed cheese even more.

Introduction
Processed cheese is manufactured by blending and melting one or more natural cheeses with other ingredients to produce a homogenous blend with desired flavor, color and functional characteristics. While this sounds like a relatively simple process, early attempts at making processed cheese were unsuccessful because heated cheeses tend to oil off, and moisture exudation commonly occurs during cooling and storage. In 1911, Walter Gerber and Fritz Stettler, Swiss dairy scientists, discovered that adding a “melting salt” (sodium citrate) prior to blending and heating cheese (Emmental cheese) resulted in a smooth, stable processed cheese. Dairy scientists quickly learned to process Cheddar and other types of cheeses with various types of “melting salts” that became known as emulsifying salts (ES) once their true function was understood. Eventually, food ingredients other than cheese were added to processed cheese. Today


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