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See why.Baby Swiss Cheese
What actually distinguishes baby Swiss from Swiss cheese, flavor-wise?
Published Jan. 1, 2014.
What You Need To Know
The “baby” in baby Swiss doesn’t just refer to the relatively small size of the wheels. To suit Americans’ tastes for milder cheese, Swiss-born cheesemakers in the 1960s made a number of changes to the recipe for regular Swiss that led to a more slight flavor: They used pasteurized milk and more salt and shortened the culturing step. They also washed out the whey with hot water and aged the cheese only briefly. As a result, most baby Swiss tastes more buttery, milky, and salty than the conventional kind, and its texture is softer and moister—more like a mild provolone or munster. Those changes also considerably shrank the size of the cheese’s “eyes”; on average, they’re about as big as peas, whereas the holes in regular Swiss can be as large as walnuts.
We assumed that profile would make baby Swiss suitable only for melting in a sandwich, but to be sure, we tasted the four products we found in grilled cheese as well as on their own. By and large, we were right: The samples melted nicely and tasted similarly mild and creamy, but we wouldn’t serve any of them on a cheese plate. However, our favorite sample did stand out for its “nutty,” “mineral-y” flavors.
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