From Cream to Cheese: Dairy Ingredients

Cream is the starting point: the fattier layer that rises to the top of milk and can be skimmed off, either by gravity or by a centrifugal separator in industrial production. It is sold in grades defined by butterfat content, from light to heavy.

Buttermilk began as the nearly fat free liquid left after churning butter from cream. Most modern buttermilk is instead made by adding lactic acid bacteria to pasteurized milk, and its acid reacts with baking soda to leaven soda bread.

Sour cream is cream fermented with lactic acid bacteria, which thicken it and give its tart taste. In the United States it must contain at least 18 percent milk fat before other ingredients are added.

Condensed milk removes roughly 60 percent of the water from milk, and the sweetened kind is preserved by its added sugar. Gail Borden Jr. pioneered its commercial production in the 1850s, and Civil War ration purchases sharply raised demand.

Cottage cheese is the simplest step from milk to cheese: an acid such as vinegar or lemon juice separates the curds from the whey, and the curds are drained, mixed with cream and salt, and never aged. The name first appeared in print in 1831.

Paneer is made the same acid-set way from hot cow or buffalo milk, but pressed so firmly that, unlike most cheeses, it does not melt when heated. That is why it holds its shape in South Asian dishes such as palak paneer and paneer tikka.

Cream cheese is a soft, mild fresh cheese made from milk and cream, and it originated in the United States in the 1870s. United States rules require at least 33 percent milk fat, and it is the base of the bagel with lox in New York.

Ricotta is a whey cheese, and its name means recooked: whey left from other cheeses is acidified, heated nearly to boiling, and the clumped proteins are strained out. The tradition on the Italian peninsula dates back to the Bronze Age.

Mozzarella is made by the pasta filata, or stretched-curd, method in southern Italy, in cow milk and buffalo milk forms. The term is first mentioned in 1570 in a cookbook by Bartolomeo Scappi, and today it is the standard cheese of pizza.

Feta is a brined white cheese from mainland Greece and Lesbos, made from sheep milk with at most 30 percent goat milk. It has held European Union Protected Designation of Origin status since 2002, though outside the EU the name is often used for similar cheeses.

Cheddar takes its name from the village of Cheddar in Somerset and is a relatively hard, sometimes sharp cheese. Joseph Harding standardized its production in the nineteenth century, and West Country Farmhouse Cheddar gained Protected Designation of Origin in 2007.

Parmesan, or Parmigiano Reggiano, is a hard granular cheese aged at least twelve months and made only in a defined area of northern Italy. The earliest written record of it dates from 1254, and its name has been protected across the European Union since 1992.