Sour milk cheese

The base ingredient for sour-milk cheeses such as ‘Harzer natural’ or ‘Harzer mit caraway’ is sour-milk quark—a very dry curd produced by acid coagulation from skimmed milk. It is seasoned with salt and optional spices (such as caraway), ground, shaped, and set aside for a few days to ripen. With a relatively high moisture content of 60–73% in the fat-free dry matter, these sour milk cheeses ripen from the outside in, much like soft cheeses. Young wheels still show a white core within the curd – this fades as the cheese matures, and the paste develops its typical spicy, robust and pleasantly tangy flavour. One defining feature of these sour milk cheeses is their high protein content (up to 37 percent), combined with a very low fat content of less than one percent in the dry matter, since they are produced exclusively from skim milk. With its low calorie count, it is an ideal choice for weight-management diets. There are two main types: red-mould sour milk cheese, which develops a yellow-reddish rind thanks to the bacterial culture Brevibacterium linens and delivers a robust flavour; Our blue-veined variety, gently inoculated with Penicillium camemberti after moulding, offers a more subtle, mildly aromatic profile.