CHAPTER X 

 SEMI-HARD CHEESES 



BETWEEN the quickly perishable soft cheeses and the 

 typical hard group, are two series of varieties, one 

 ripened by green mold and best known by Roquefort, 

 the other ripened by bacteria and typified by Brick 

 cheese. These cheeses are fairly firm, hold their shape 

 well, ripen over a period varying from a few weeks to 

 several months and their marketable period is com- 

 paratively long. In texture they are intermediate be- 

 tween the conditions known as " soft " and " hard." 

 In water-content, they range at their best from 37 to 

 45 per cent. Outside these limits, the cheeses are often 

 marketable but they lose in quality l and trueness to type. 



166. The green mold group. There are three well- 

 known semi-hard cheeses ripened by green or blue-green 

 mold. 2 The mold is an incidental factor in certain other 

 forms but none of these forms has won larger than local 

 or purely national recognition. French Roquefort, on the 

 contrary, is probably the most widely known of all cheeses. 

 Stilton, to a small degree at least, has followed the English 

 to the many lands they inhabit. Gorgonzola, although 



1 Currie, J. N., The relation of composition to quality in 

 cheese, American Food Jour. 11 (1916), no. 9, page 458. See also 

 Dox on the True Composition of Roquefort Cheese, Ztsch. 

 Untersuch. Nahr. u. Genussmtl. 22 (1911), pages 239-242. 



2 Thorn, C., and Matheson, K. J., Biology of Roquefort cheese, 

 Storrs Exp. Sta. Bui. 79, pages 335-347, 1914. 



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