then I could really be an authentic Cheese Head. I have loved cheese since I was still in diapers. Other kids would cry for candy but Mom said I said Cheese before MaMa. When we were in France no one would go near the Epoisse but me. The smell is a cross between a barn yard and dirty socks. YUM!
When I would visit my Paternal Grandmother on Saturdays after a long day of cleaning and baking we would take a break and have a snack of Cougar Gold Cheese and Crackers. I thought this cheese was amazing mostly because it came in a can but also because my Dad forbade it in our house. He made his reasoning quit clear. "I ate enough of that junk in the war!"
Well, I really didn't think much about it then but it turns out that Cougar Gold Cheese is really a miracle food. Here's the short version:
We owe Cougar Gold’s existence to a professor’s ingenuity in the 1940s. With the looming prospect of another World War, the U.S. government sought better ways to preserve the cheese it sent to troops overseas. While the typical process of dipping rounds into wax effectively sealing the cheese, the wax’s delicate structure made it prone to cracking, causing unwanted spoilage. So, dairy husbandry professor N.S. Golding and his team started work on cheese in a can.
But there was one problem. As a living food, cheese is home to good bacteria that transform lactose into lactic acid and release carbon dioxide. And, unlike wax, tin cans are a non-porous substance, meaning that cheese aged in a tin container tends to distend or even explode the cans. To resolve this issue, Golding and his team invented a special bacteria culture, which, when added to the cheese, reduced the amount of carbon dioxide released and enabled it to be safely stored in a can without the possibility of exploding.
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