SnogBlogy

String cheese has for sure made repeat appearances on your faculty lunchbox. Here's why the peel-able stuff is so darn stringy.

Gouda, muenster, cheddar, feta, Brie. The international of cheese is vast, as it is estimated that there are greater than 1,800 various kinds of cheese in the world. Of the array of coagulated milk variants is a mild cheese that incessantly starred on your college lunches. Mom used to be on your side when she packed you string cheese snacks, making monotonous lunch sessions tasty and amusing.

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Though we do not generally critique the consuming habits of others, people who take massive bites out of string cheese — tearing into the stick like it's a corn canine — are doing all of it wrong. String cheese will have to be savored, pulled aside ever so delicately. As we peel, and pick, and pluck, we never think about why string cheese is, well, stringy. We're right here to answer the question foodies never knew that they had.

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Why is string cheese stringy? It's all about the manipulation of milk proteins.

In a Season 4 episode of Succession, an angry Kerry Castellabate (Zoe Winters) threatens to rip Greg Hirsch (Nicholas Braun) "apart like a human string cheese." Unless Cousin Greg the Egg is manufactured from mozzarella, it is impossible.

According to Baker Cheese — a Wisconsin-based, family-owned string cheese producer — "mozzarella cheese is the only type of cheese that has a stringing quality, naturally." (Per a long piece through The Atlantic, Frank Baker of Baker Cheese supposedly invented string cheese in the mid-'70s.)

While a number of corporations offer cheese stick snacks — Frigo makes gouda sticks, as an example — pulling the non-mozzarella ones aside will just give upward thrust to frustration, to not point out a crumbly mess.

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As for why mozzarella — fabricated from milk, culture, and rennet (which accommodates the enzyme rennin) —will also be separated into strands, Jim Wallace of the New England Cheese Supply Company and Brian Baker of Baker Cheese instructed HuffPost that it is all in the procedure, which impacts the alignment of milk proteins.

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As cheese curds are heated, substances soften, milk proteins transfer and alter. Once a cohesive blob paperwork, standard mozzarella is often shaped into blocks or rolled into balls. Though it's peel-able, the string cheese-making process takes things a bit further.

Baker Cheese shared that the mozzarella is "stretched and pulled by an auger while simultaneously being heated to 140 degrees [Fahrenheit]." Giant mozzarella ropes are created, and the milk proteins align horizontally, changing into stretchy.

For Baker Cheese, the final steps contain soaking the cheese in "temperature-controlled salt brine" to "lock in" freshness.

At Eighty calories a pop (and just 50 energy for Baker's light string cheese sticks) and no preservatives or components, Baker's string cheese is a creamy, refreshing snack value a thousand strings, no matter that implies.

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