Birth of 'vegan' cheese: How invention of microbial rennet conquered orthodox Indian market
or confrontations over meat, with large scale food production usually exacerbating these issues.
It’s good to learn of one case where potential controversies have been overcome by scientific research and commercial compulsions. This is with cheese, whose basic origin seems calculated to cause conflicts
because it involves milk curdled with rennet, a set of enzymes found in animal stomachs.
Histories of cheese suggest it was first made when milk was stored in the stomach of calves, whose
milk diet requires them to have rich reserves of rennet.
In 'On Food And Cooking', Harold McGee’s authoritative book on food science he writes that over 2,000 years back shepherds started making a brine extract from stomachs of young animals to curdle milk: “That extract was the world’s first semi purified enzyme.”
Acid also curdles cheese, as anyone who has added lime juice to milk knows.
But it does it so thoroughly
that a lot of flavour compounds are washed away in the whey, leaving the relatively tasteless firm
curd we call paneer.
Rennet’s gentler curdling creates a softer, tastier curd which forms the basis of cheese. But this creates
a problem for vegetarians and, in particular, for orthodox Hindu proscriptions against cow slaughter.
This issue has long been recognised in India. In 1884 theTimes of India ran a report titled ‘Vegetable ‘Rennet for Cheese Making’ which acknowledged that in India “some vegetable substitute must be found for ordinary animal rennet, since cheese made with the latter is unsaleable among the natives”.
The report recommended Withania coagulans, a relative of the ayurvedic herb ashwagandha, whose coagulating ability is so well known it is calledpaneer booti in parts of north India.
Such vegetable
