10x unnecessary facts about cheese (that you secretly want to know anyway)
From soft, creamy goat cheese to fragrant washed-rind cheese and spicy gorgonzola… I really can’t live without it. I’m not the only one, because according to colleague Kiki from Amayzine, we eat an average of around twenty kilos of cheese per person per year! And did you already know this about the most addictive piece of pure pleasure?
1. Strange but true: the holes in Swiss cheese are caused by gas formation caused by lactic acid bacteria. Yes, they produce a kind of little farts.
2. Did you know that in 1906 there were more than a hundred small cheese factories in North Holland? Now there are only two large cheese factories left: in Lutjewinkel and Beemster.
3. The most expensive cheese costs no less than one thousand euros per kilo. Not Dutch, by the way, but Serbian cheese made from donkey’s milk, called ‘Pule’.
4. Officially, an aged cheese may only be called ‘aged cheese’ once it has matured for ten months. If it has matured for less time, it is extra mature, mature, young mature or young cheese.
5. Processed cheese can contain up to twice as much salt as regular cheese.
6. Oh, and fun fact: cheese protects your teeth against cavities. It stimulates saliva production, which in turn protects against cavities – yes, even if it’s Swiss cheese 😉
7. Seventy percent of the calories in regular cheese come from fat, and cream cheese contains no less than ninety percent fat. This makes it so greasy that it’s equivalent to eating Vaseline (!!!)
8. Did you know that one kilo of cheese requires ten litres of cow’s milk, nine and a half litres of goat’s milk or six litres of sheep’s milk? Pretty heavy, actually…
9. Mice don’t like cheese at all. There, now you know. They will eat it if there’s nothing else around, but when given a choice, they always prefer sweets or carbohydrates.
10. We really do live up to our reputation as cheeseheads. But only three percent of Dutch people say they never eat cheese. Of the 97 percent who do eat cheese, 66 percent say they eat it every day. It’s just the slicing of cheese, well, that remains a precarious matter…
Read also:
- 10x completely ridiculously unnecessary facts about pizza
- 10x completely ridiculous facts about McDonald’s
- Six things you didn’t know about chocolate
