Chapter 6: Cheese Ripening: An Overview of Technological Strategies Towards Process Acceleration

Cheese is a fermented food characterized by its many different flavours, textures, and aromas. Ripening is a crucial technological step in cheese manufacturing, constituting a cascade of biochemical events that confer unique sensory attributes, which demands long aging times depending on the cheese variety. This chapter will deal with the identification of technological strategies designed to accelerate cheese ripening by means of ripening profile studies and sensory characterization. Therefore, we will review the current knowledge of the principal contributions: physical treatments applied to cheese milk or to the final product, the use of exogenous enzymes, and the design of primary and adjunct starters. Particularly, we will focus on its applications in hard and semi-hard cheeses, for which a slow ripening period is necessary to achieve the desired product quality.