In recent years, the production of cheese has tended to become mechanical, as is witnessed by my earlier U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,154,002; 3,156,567; 3,449,127 and 3,636,630 and the Brockwell U.S. Pat. No. 4,309,941. The ultimate goal, of course, has been to develop machinery which will produce a desired cheese of high uniformity in texture, flavor and quality with the desired salt and moisture content, untouched by human hands in the making. Although progress has been made, all of the heretofore known methods and devices have fallen far short of the goal of their designers, particularly in the area of the need and desire for uniform salting.
It has been recognized throughout the industry that brine salting of cheese should yield preferable results, if it can be accomplished without undue loss of both salt and cheese product and without undue expense and difficulties in the operation. Early attempts along this line were made, as witnessed by the McCadam U.S. Pat. No. 3,078,169, but none have proved satisfactory. In fact, they have proved to be so unsatisfactory that the industry has tended to give up on the problem and to assume that it is not capable of being solved in a practical manner, if at all.
Most such methods and devices, such as that disclosed in the McCadam U.S. Pat. No. 3,078,169 incur substantial loss of both cheese product and salt, which makes its implementation prohibitive. Some utilize high temperatures which inevitably produce high fat losses. Most have returned to efforts to utilize dry salt in an improved manner. My own patent, U.S. Pat. No. 3,636,630 is directed toward that end, since manual sprinkling of salt on the curd as generally practiced has been not only unsanitary but haphazard by virtue of unevenness of distribution and of absorption by the curd.
The application of dry salt also introduces highly undesirable foreign solids, which are impurities contained within the salt. Uneven distribution of salt content makes it impossible to produce a product which is uniform in either moisture content, texture or flavor. Mechanical application of dry salt, although an improvement over manual application, is nevertheless incapable of entirely precluding occasional local, non-uniform salt and moisture content, texture and flavor.
No one has heretofore come forward with either a method or apparatus which is commercially successful for utililizing brine salting on a production line basis, or on any basis, for that matter. Some, such as Brockwell, U.S. Pat. No. 4,309,941 outline the problems involved and seek to minimize costs involved in producing machinery for the continuous production of cheese. While such motives are praiseworthy, the ultimate goal is not reached unless a truly high grade cheese will result from following the construction and methods disclosed therein. The machine shown in the above Brockwell patent cannot produce such a cheese. The use of a whey-based brine as taught by the above patent, for example, is unsatisfactory because of the tremendous build-up of bacteria and acidity when the whey is placed in a tank with solid salt to produce the needed brine; also, the required salt content within the curd cannot be obtained by a brief application of brine, such as is shown in the above Brockwell and McCadam patents. Ideally, curd should be allowed to soak in brine, but that is commercially impractical.
The percentage of salt retention by the curd is an important cost consideration in the use of brine for salting purposes. Since brine which is not absorbed, cannot be collected and applied repeatedly, substantial cost is involved unless a relatively high percentage of absorption is obtained in the application of brine to the curd. The method and apparatus disclosed herein successfully solves the above problems and have proved highly successful for use on a production line basis to produce cheese of the highest quality at a substantial profit, provided by an improved resultant product as well as actual out-of-pocket savings in its manufacture.