Why Is Some Cheese Orange?

All cheese is produced from milk that is then processed to produce cheese. Cow, goat and sheep’s milk are the most common milks used for cheese making. Milk is white, so why aren’t all cheeses white like mozzarella?  Cheddar cheese for example, is orange and many others range in color from off-white to light yellow to deep orange.

Milk

All milk isn’t actually white, and that leads to the explanation for why we have so much variety in the colors of cheeses. The actual color of milk produced from an animal varies according to the animal’s diet. For example, an animal might eat mostly hay in the winter, which produces slightly off-white colored milk. In the spring and summer however, pasture fed animals may eat a lot of fresh grass, which contains higher levels of beta-carotene. The milk they produce is orange tinged. The cheese curds produced from the different shades of milk are differently colored as well.

Yellow And Orange Cheese

Because of the variation in the animals’ diets the curds for some cheeses such as cheddar are different colors. Cheese produced in the spring and summer is more of an orange color, and cheese produced in fall and winter is more yellow or off- white. Because the cheese produced from grass fed animals was believed to contain more butterfat, the orange cheese was believed to be better. This left cheese makers with less desirable cheese to sell for half of the year.

To make the fall and winter cheese appear to be as orange as the spring and summer cheese, they began adding dye to the cheese curds to produce a more orange color. This led to no discernible difference between cheeses produced at different times of the year.

Adding Color To Cheeses

Raw, unpasteurized and pasteurized milks can all be used to make cheeses. The milk is heated, and sometimes a small amount of acid is added so that the milk will begin to thicken. In the case for most cheeses, the milk has been left to “ripen” a while so that lactic acid is naturally produced in order to begin the process.  Rennet is then added to the milk to aid in the coagulation process, which allows the cheese curds to be separated from the liquid whey. The curds are cut and continue cooking and then the whey is strained off.

Depending on the type of cheese made, the cheese may undergo further processing. Cheddar cheese, for example, then has dye added to it. Dye made from the Annatto tree is a common one used to dye cheeses an orange color. Cheddar cheese curds are stacked on each other to produce layers, and undergo further processes, such as aging, to complete the cheese making process. Other cheeses, such as mozzarella, are ready to be eaten very soon after the curds are cut and cooked, and have no dyes added to them. Not all cheeses are dyed with the same amount or same type of dye, which leads to the variation of yellow and orange cheeses.