Cheesemaking: Leveraging tradition for the future
Cheese is deeply rooted in Swiss culture, built on generations of knowledge about fermentation, cultures, ripening and craftsmanship. Now a Swiss creamery explores how cheesemaking can evolve into the future – while preserving the craft, know-how and traditions that make Swiss cheese so special. Building on this inherited knowledge, they developed a Swiss hard cheese made from locally grown lupins following a process like traditional cheesemaking: making (lupin) milk, fermenting it with cheese cultures, forming the wheels, smearing the rind and leaving them to ripen for months, monitoring, tasting and adjusting along the way. This requires patience, precision and the same cheesemaking skills that have been developed over generations. The main thing that is changed is the raw material: instead of animal milk from Swiss cows, the creamery uses plant milk made from lupins grown by Swiss farmers. According to their crowdfunding pitch to scale up from experimental wheels to a product the...