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Tailor-made surface starter cultures for smear cheeses
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The quality of fermented products is largely determined by properties such as flavour, texture and appearance. Starter cultures are of prime importance for enabling and improving these properties. NIZO food research has an extensive track record in developing and tailoring starter cultures for the (dairy) industry. Our knowledge of microbial properties, formation of flavour compound and ingredients and of population dynamics of starter cultures enables us to efficiently select microbial strains for starter cultures. Cultures have been successfully selected, and commercially applied in Dutch hard-type cheeses, e.g. for debittering and for diversification of flavour. By applying our analytical tools and extensive knowledge of metabolic routes targeted selection of natural isolates was possible, thereby exploiting the natural diversity in food-grade microorganisms. In the EU demonstration project Safesmear, coordinated by NIZO food research, a method was successfully developed for constructing tailor-made defined surface starter cultures for smear cheeses. NIZO has facilities for culturing micro-organisms from lab scale to semi-industrial scale. |
