Food | Why does cheese crunch in the mouth? The solution to the riddle was found in Finland

Some the cheeses are famous for their crackling, and include Finnish bread cheese and halloumi originally from Cyprus.

Why do those cheeses crunch when you bite into them?

Bread cheese the sound fascinated the Dutch acoustics expert, professor of medical physics at the University of Tampere Michiel Postemaa.

The real specialty of Goudamaa’s growth is the use of ultrasound in medicine. Cheese also resembles biological tissue, and therefore it is interesting how sound behaves in it.

The phenomenon to find out, the research team cut cheeses with a knife and recorded their sound for analysis.

It turned out that bread cheese is like a string orchestra. The sound of the violin is created when the bow rubs the string and makes it vibrate.

The same goes for bread cheese. The casein proteins in cheese form strands that are like microscopic violin strings.

“When teeth or a knife rub against the protein, its movement creates a sound wave, which is amplified by the air pockets in the cheese like an echo chamber. It works just like a violin,” explains Postema.

He compares the sound to the cries of seagulls. When you combine the sounds of a hundred slices of bread and cheese, it really does sound like a flock of seagulls.

Researchers noticed that the mozzarella also makes noises. However, the sound is so quiet that the human ear can hardly hear it.

The gouda cheese used as a control, on the other hand, did not crackle.

The secret to the sound of bread cheese, halloumi and other crackling cheeses is in the way they are made.

Bread cheese is cream cheese that is not cooked like regular cheese. After settling and draining, the curd is simply fried.

During production, the cheese’s casein strings, or “violin strings”, are preserved.

During ripening, the casein strands are split. Even though Emmental, for example, has big air pockets, it doesn’t ring because straps are missing.

Fresh cheese also remains silent if the moisture has filled the air pockets that act as an echo chamber.

Sound can be a significant part of the dining experience, says the research professor of food development at the University of Turku Anu Hopiawho also participated in the bread and cheese research.

“It’s as if the sound produced by food is not recognized as important. But studies have shown that if it’s missing or changed, it essentially affects that sensory experience,” says Hopia.

A researcher from the University of Oxford once received the Nobel Prize for humor for showing that the fattening of potato chips is an integral part of the pleasure derived from them.

In another study, already carried out in the 1950s, the object was the hiss of beer.

In an experiment, a Danish researcher inadvertently changed the hiss of two different Carlsberg beers, and it clearly reduced the pleasantness of the drinks.

“These are great examples of how extremely sensitive our senses are. We don’t even know that we sense something different.”

With bread cheese, this time the researchers only investigated the generation of sound, not its effect on the sensation of food.

Professor Postema thinks that sound could perhaps be used in cheese making to either speed it up or slow it down.

Cheeses ripening in Switzerland already have called Mozart and rap and watched how their taste changes.

The audio tests of Leipäjuusto were done by a medical technology student at the University of Tampere Elina Nurkkalaand the supervisor of the work was also a university lecturer Craig S. Carlson from Aalto University.