Author: Lauren Williams / Source: Atlas Obscura
Underneath a laboratory’s fluorescent lights, Rachel Dutton examines a cheese morsel. It’s not so much a treat as it is a mystery. That’s because Dutton is a scientist—a molecular biology detective of sorts—who has devoted her career to studying the tiny bacterial communities that live in and on cheese.
Her tool of choice is a microscope, which she uses to pore over evidence hidden within microscopic crumbles. Ultimately, she hopes to uncover how these microbes create colonies within these creamy and waxen morsels.From Camembert to cotija, making any type of cheese essentially starts in the same way. Cheesemakers take fresh milk, then curdle it into clumps. This results in watery whey, which they then mold into shape. From there, all the cheese has to do is sit and age. Yet it’s the near-invisible community of bacteria that not only gives cheese its funk, but is also capable of transforming a few simple ingredients into an addictive kitchen staple. Many mass-produced cheesemakers use packets of bacteria to form these cultures. But change the bacteria within cheese, and it becomes an entirely different beast.
Along with her lab crew at UC San Diego, Dutton has made immense progress in identifying the myriad bacteria, yeast, molds, and viruses that live on wheels and in wedges of cheese. Some bacteria and fungi stick together, forming the rind that lines a wheel of cheese’s exterior. Others devour the inside of the cheese, and create the kinds of lapis-hued blooms within blue cheese. And some burp carbon dioxide when they consume lactic acid inside the cheese, which is what gives Swiss cheese its distinctive interior.
Dutton believes that studying the minutiae of bacteria can teach us about the microbial communities—also known as microbiomes—found on virtually every conceivable surface, in the human body, and in the ocean. “We’re kind of using cheese like our lab rat,” explains Dutton. “The goal of using a simple microbiome, like cheese, is to understand how these communities are built and how to manipulate them if we want to.” It’s no wonder that her intriguing approach to food science has caught the attention of kitchen innovators, such as Momofuku’s David Chang, who Dutton collaborated with several years ago.
Dutton originally studied molecular biology at Harvard University’s medical school. After earning her PhD, she worked in the cellars of Vermont cheesemaker Jasper Hill Farm for several months; there, she marveled at how each morsel of cheese contained a tiny world within it. That fall, she went back to Harvard, this time starting her own lab focused on teasing out how these worlds form.
In 2014, Dutton’s lab studied some 150 types of cheese from 10 different countries to determine similarities and variances. Similar work had been done in France, but nothing on the same scale as…
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