Submitted via IRC for takyon
After years of lobbying, industrial producers are now allowed to make camembert with pasteurised milk. As a result, one of France's beloved cheeses may be disappearing – for good.
Source: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180618-the-end-to-a-french-cheese-tradition
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Entropy on Tuesday June 26 2018, @06:21PM (6 children)
You may or may not have tried non-pasteurised products. Try to find "fresh squeezed(aka non-pasteurised) orange juice somewhere and test the difference. Allowing pasteurised to be marketed the same as non-pasteurised basically kills the non-pasteurised product. There's a large difference product quality(taste), a large difference in product cost(price), and most consumers are not going to pour through the ingredients one by one and look to see which one is non-pasteurised. Probably someone will ask for the cheese, and they will pick it up by label not knowing the difference.
We are of course mass market forced fed that pasteurised = good, but that isn't always the case. We're doing some pretty awful things to our food supply these days. If you're never tried eggs from chickens someone has raised, or non-pasteurised orange juice(fresh squeezed) you should really give them a try. The difference is quite profound.
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday June 26 2018, @06:52PM (3 children)
Orange juice is pasteurized mostly for longer shelf life. It's true that pasteurization can produce a significant difference in the flavor. But on an industrial scale of production, pasteurization adds a safety layer.
Milk is pasteurized because historically it was a huge disease-carrying agent (and still can be, particularly in large industrial herds where milk from thousands of cows is often intermingled during processing).
And frankly, the taste of unpasteurized milk isn't so different than pasteurized. (Note I'm talking about low-temp pasteurization; UHT pasteurization definitely alters flavor significantly.) Those who claim that they taste a significant difference often are buying their unpasteurized milk from a farm that uses better cows (often different breeds) and/or are buying unhomogenized milk too, which has a different impact and different flavor profile depending on whether you get a glass with some cream or not. Most of the raw milk afficionados are basing their arguments on misconceptions -- not that there is no difference in unpasteurized milk, but there's very little benefit compared to risk.
Unpasteurized cheese is a different case, since some cheese processing depends on those microorganisms naturally in unpasteurized milk to aid in processing and/or provide some distinct flavor elements. In some long-aged or heavily processed cheeses, the difference is generally negligible. But in "fresh" cheeses and those eaten very "young," there can be more noticeable flavor differences. And most cheese processes (though not all) tend to lower the risk of bacterial problems compared to raw milk.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday June 26 2018, @08:23PM (2 children)
I've never seen milk that was unpasteurized but homogenized, though I suppose it's possible to do. Raw milk means neither has been done. And yes, obviously you want to get that from a smaller farm that has good quality control, you're not going to mix the milk of 1000 cows and then sell it raw, that would be nuts.
Anytime you mix milk you increase risk of disease significantly, unless you pasteurize. So you can see how if you want the bulk econo-milk you're not going to get raw.
But in a very real sense, you don't get milk either. It just doesn't taste anything like real milk. Is it less nutritious? That I do not claim to know. But it certainly doesn't taste like milk.
I don't crave a real high fat milk so I just skim the cream off and use it for treats. If you do want a higher fat milk, though, you can stir it up, poor mans homogenization on the spot.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday June 26 2018, @09:06PM (1 child)
It's very difficult to do "quality control" that will catch all bad raw milk, even on smaller farms. There have been a number of outbreaks tracked by the CDC from small farms with reasonable hygiene and quality control.
Well, YMMV.
I don't claim to be a raw milk afficionado, but I've had it from at least a half-dozen different farms in my lifetime. (I grew up in an area that had a number of dairy farms and helped milk cows on one of them myself periodically when I was a kid.) Some raw milk I've had has been great -- very sweet and rich and amazing, though from a different cow breed -- while some was mediocre, some relatively flavorless and inferior to average pasteurized milk I've had (this was milk I milked out of a cow myself), and some had strong flavors (like very "grassy") that were not a net-positive.
I'd attribute a lot of the differences in flavor profile to the individual farms (e.g., cow diet and living conditions) and types of cows, as well as seasonal variation, but overall I really don't think it tastes a lot different from normal low-temp pasteurized milk (1% or skim, since as you point out, it's not generally homogenized). I've had various profiles of pasteurized milk too -- some much better than others. Certainly I'd say my raw milk experiences have had more varied tastes overall.
I tried looking around the internet for double-blind taste tests with raw milk, but couldn't really find any (except for a New Yorker article from a few years back where pasteurized homogenized was judged superior, but I don't know what the conditions of that were and it sounds like they only compared two milks -- one of which was homogenized and the other not). I suspect if the raw milk advocates actually had data supporting their "better taste" assertions in blind testing, they'd be trumpeting it from the hilltops....
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday June 26 2018, @10:24PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Informative) by archfeld on Tuesday June 26 2018, @08:00PM (1 child)
Truly fresh squeezed OJ made from the oranges I harvest from the trees in my backyard is 'INCREDIBLY' good and direct proof of God in my opinion. Even fresh squeezed from the market is noticeably inferior but still much better than concentrated frozen orange sludge.
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 26 2018, @09:08PM
Nah, I like my corn syrup packed gray fruit pulp dyed with yellow #5 thank you very much.