Kenneth Coble muttered....


> It's interesting to trace these different local names for stuff...
> thanks for replying. We could probably get a halfway decent new
> thread out of the topic... Anyway, I'm off to have dinner, and a big
> chunk of Maytag Blue (thereby neatly stepping out of the whole yellow
> cheese arena!)

I still think of the "Black Rind" as , hopefully, sharper. One of the
advantages of a multi-cultural environment is that a number of STexas
dairies now produce passable Mexican cheeses in several varieties fro dry
and crumbly through meltable and the new "fresh' sorts, all a bit different
than to what the standard "store bought" American palate may be used.

"Longhorn" may be a regional term, but usually suggests a Cheddar/Colby
type cheese produced in logs instead of big wheels.

Color - Most American cheeses are "dyed to match" to achieve that glorious
orange glow, and I suspect that the color comes straight from Mexico's
annatto seeds, also apparently used in Chile to supplement the food of farm
raised salmon and steelhead trout. I've been told that the need to color
comes both from customer preference and the composition of dairy cattle
feed in the US, long on makeup from materials which lend no color to dairy
products. Having grown up around cotton, the idea that any beast could be
happy chewing cotton seed cake.....

Being old enough to remember when the milk delivered by our local small
dairy came with a few inches of buttercup yellow cream atop the bottle, I
don't reckon they "bleach" store-bought whipping cream these days.

TMO

TMO