Los Banos Rotary Club History
Peluso Tells Story Of Cheese Making

It's the bugs in cheese that makes it good and gives it the distinctive flavor.
For that statement you have the word of Frank Peluso, manager of the New Sonoma Creamery here, second largest manufacturer of cheese in this state. However, he adds hastily, he means "good bugs," or more specifically a mold spore that working with rennet, pepsin and other materials, combines to change fresh milk into the more than one thousand varieties of cheese.
Addressing the Rotary Club Tuesday noon and the Lions Club Tuesday evening, Peluso related the history of cheese manufacturing from ancient times to the present, and briefly reviewed a few of the processes and problems of the cheese industry.

He related how, back in ancient times, desert nomads in north Africa stored fresh goat's milk in a bag formed from the stomachs of newly slaughtered goats. Sometimes this milk would curdle in the bag, and when set out to dry, would form a tasty, palatable substance quite similar to our cheese of today.
Because of its high food value, freedom from spoilage, concentrated form and pleasing taste, cheese has throughout the centuries always been an important food of almost every country in the world. Greatest advancement and perfection of the manufacturing processes, however, has come only after the discovery of pasteurization by Pasteur.

Basically, Peluso said, all manufacturing processes are generally the same, the distinctive flavors and characteristics being basically determined by the mold spore introduced in the milk during process of manufacture. Most of these mold spores are native to some particular area or section and impossible of exact duplication elsewhere. As an example he cited Roquefort cheese, a native of France, developed with a blue mold that gives it its sharp, distinctive flavor. Though many Roquefort type cheese have been develop, true Roquefort flavor cannot be developed other than in the ripening caves of its native France. The same, he said, is true of Camembert (also French) and many others, including the famed Italian Romano cheese, which is so popular in America.

On the problem side, Peluso cited the sanitation precautions and practices necessary to produce good cheese with a true flavor. First the dairy-fresh milk is pasteurized to kill all "bugs," then the "good bugs" or mold spores are added, together with the rennet, pepsin, etc, necessary to the curdling, ageing and flavoring processes.

One of the newer problems, Peluso said, is penicillin which is medicine's modern drug miracle, which was developed from a specific type of green mold. When administered to a sick cow the drug is transmitted into the cow's milk, oftimes retaining enough strength to attack and nullify the mold spores introduced in the cheese manufacturing process.

Peluso said the industry is endeavoring to secure passage of a law requiring that penicillin be dyed or vanilla flavoring added so that its presence in milk can be detected at the creamery before such milk is dumped into the cheese vats.

Not the least of the industry's troubles, Peluso said, are the ever changing moods of the public, who tastes change with the moon. Too sweet, too sour, too salty, not enough salt, too soft, too hard – it's all a never ending battle to please the public and garner in enough nickels of the food dollar to continue operations.

Also guests at the Rotary luncheon were Fresno State Coach Pete Beiden and other of the star-studded personnel who conducted the baseball clinic here Monday and Tuesday.

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