[Sca-cooks] cheese color

[Philip Troy]

On Wednesday 25 July 2001 08:36, Margaret FitzWilliam wrote:
>
> I am remembering a passage in one of the "Little House" books by Laura
> Ingalls Wilder where someone was watching their mother make butter (it was
> probably Almanzo in _Farmer Boy_, but I could be wrong) where she colored
> the butter with a carrot that she grated and squeezed the juice from.
>
> Granted, orange carrots aren't necessarily always appropriate for us,
> but could you color cheese with carrot juice? The beta carotene would
> certainly make it orange or yellow.

Yes, it would. How stable the coloring would be, I don't know, nor how long
it would last unchanged during the various fermentation/mold processes. In
theory vegetable-based yellow pigments are pretty hard to destroy, compared
to blues, greens, and reds. On the other hand, the question of why it would
be necessary for home-made cheese to look more like factory-made cheese comes
up.

But it should work, up to a point. Once upon a time, maybe even in the
lifetime of some people on this list (although not me, I confess), margarine
used to be sold with a coloring packet, a sort of capsule of carotene-based
dye, because the FDA and the American Dairy Farmers Board, or some such,
declared that butter substitutes could not be colored artificially to make
them look too much like butter. As if most butter is as alarmingly yellow as
a lot of margarine can be, anyway. Be that as it may, you had to knead this
coloring stuff into your pound of margarine when you bought it. If it was
intended to last as many months as your average hunk of cheddar does, I can't
say.

Adamantius