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We knew when we
reduced sodium in cheese, we were going to change the flavor of cheese so the first
thing we want to do was make sure we came up with a product
that people felt tasted really good, because it's number one in
Sargento that
the product has to taste good or we wouldn't launch it.
The first two
items that we looked at were actually
sodium replacers
and the two sodium replacers that we studied very closely were
ammonium chloride and potassium chloride.
In studying this
we had to make cheese with these replacers
in the cheese and
when we made the cheese, we then would have to leave it to
mature for about
anywhere from a month to two months before we could do a sensory test on it because
cheese
isn't made the day you make it, cheese takes another
month or two
to develop flavor and that flavor has to be
a part of the cheese overall flavor.
So we have to, when we're researching the cheese we have to make
the cheese, wait,
do sensory, get the results and go back again. Sensory challenges were that
the replacers were just
very difficult to overcome. The public
are sensitive to them and not only that but we found that the more people tasted
some of the potassium chlorides the more sensitive they became and even if we
reduce the amounts to very tiny amounts they were still able to pick it up.
We felt that we had to
get away from this area if we were going to solve the problem so we went
back and looked at how
you could make cheese with just lower salt. Salt is an integral part
of cheese and it does numerous jobs within cheese. It's not just a flavor
enhancer, but it also controls bacteria in cheese
it also has a very big effect on the ripening and the continuous ripening of
cheese as it gets older so if you don't have enough salt there
you can run into problems later on as the cheese ages because
as you know cheese is a
fermented product that has living bacteria in it all its life so it
it continues to age, it continues to produce flavors.
These flavors have to be in balance and once you remove the salt, you have a tendency
to disturb that balance over time. We came up with a number of procedures for
changing the way the cheese is made
so that we could alter
the proportion of salt to the other ingredients within the cheese and in
doing this we were able to develop a cheese which we have
patent-pending on
which allows us to make a
really interesting
good-flavored cheese with 25% reduction in salt.
That's quite a reduction in sodium and we hope by reducing to a
smaller extent the level of sodium in cheese that we can help that
effort.