Tofu and Cheese
Soybean is a very ordinary farm product in China, so we have many ways to cook it. A few thousand years ago, we Chinese invented a soybean food – tofu, however, the name of such food was named not by Chinese but Japanese. They learned the method of making this from China and carried forward it to all over the world.
Milk is daily food in Europe; as a result, they also know how to change the shape of milk to create more other dairy. Cheese is one of most famous dairy around the world, and it’s the favor of many foreigners, and the necessary of their life.
Yesterday, Dr. Aimin Jiang presentated a livestock product class for us. He is a famous profession in this area, so in my opinion, half of the class he just showed off himself, yet if I were he, I have confident to make a parade too. He said the Cheese made in China must be better than which are made in Canada. For China has a long history of Cheese making (exactly I should say we have abundance experiment in tofu making), however, Canada just has about one hundred years’ history. Without doubt, we should be good in making Cheese. [xrspook:I just repeated the words by Dr. Jiang.]
Dr. Jiang said the most core technology of tofu and cheese is coagulating the casein in soybean-milk and milk. We use different technique to achieve this coagulate. I’m not familiar to cheese at all, even don’t know what is the exactly taste of traditional cheese, yet I have eaten many kinds of tofu. I believe, with such basic, Chinese could do a good job in cheese making, but we need more time to grope. In cheese’s field, we are just green hands now.
One thing I still wonder, the consumption of milk in China is still growing; the average of milk consumption is very low. Do we really have so many milk to make superior cheese to satisfy a small amount of wealthy and foreigners who live in China? Ten ton milk just could condense one ton cheese, as the separate of the whey cheese boost its price sharply too.
I’m not a professional in livestock product, yet I know in some technical degree, Chinese tofu are similar to foreign cheese, but they are still different food from shape, odor, flavor and custom, so they are not identical forever.