Raw milk has natural bacteria and minerals that help cheese coagulate and develop flavor. Pasteurization kills those microbes, forcing cheesemakers to add calcium chloride to compensate. A calf's stomach shows how the process works: warmth, acidity, and rennet do the job naturally.
Raw milk, it comes out of a cow's udder, and it's perfectly designed to be turned into cheese. That little calf that is going to drink that milk relies on this ability of milk to turn to cheese to actually be able to survive. So that milk comes out of the udder, it's nice and warm, it goes into the little calf's stomach where it's also warm, it's acidic in there, there are enzymes, we know these enzymes called rennet. All of these things kind of combine to cause that milk to go from its liquid form to its solid form or its cheese form. And so when we're making cheese with raw milk, we are able to sort of mimic this natural process. Mm-hmm. And that helps us to make better cheese. If you are making cheese from pasteurized milk that's at the grocery store, during the pasteurization process, the composition of that milk has been damaged, so there's not these natural good beneficial bacterias in it. The mineral components of it has been damaged, so you have to add something back in called calcium chloride. A few of these things have to be done when you are dealing with pasteurized milk, where it's just so much easier if you're dealing with
