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Cheese from Brazil, Pará

Queijo do MarajóQueijo do Marajó tipo creme

Buffalo milk, skimmed for the creme type, gets 0.5–1% of the previous day's whey and is left at room temperature overnight to sour and set on its own. The curd is drained, washed with water and then with hot milk until it binds, pressed, ground and salted at 1–2%. It is then fried with the cream (or, for the manteiga type, with home-made butter) to at least 80 °C and moulded, with no ripening.

Fully documentedCheese27 hState production rules (Portaria ADEPARÁ 418/2013); first artisanal-product certificate of ParáFamily: Acid-heat set cheese family (FERMENTATION BOUNDARY)

Recipe

Amounts from a sourceThe regulation gives proportions, not batch sizes. Cheeses are cylinders or bricks of about 250–500 g.
Buffalo milk, alone or with at most 40% cow milkReaches the dairy within 3 hours of the end of milking[marajo-portaria]
Whey from the previous day's make (soro fermento)0.5–1% of the milk volume[marajo-portaria]
Skimmed buffalo milk (preferably) for washing the curd[marajo-portaria]
Salt1–2% of the curd weight[marajo-portaria]
Fresh cream from skimming the milk (tipo creme), or butter churned and clarified from the cream (tipo manteiga)[marajo-portaria]
Optional potassium sorbate, sodium citrate and sodium bicarbonateUp to 0.10% of the product (sorbate); up to 40 g/kg of curd (citrate)Bicarbonate according to the curd's acidity[marajo-portaria]
Starterwhey from the previous day's make (backslopping)

Total time across the recorded steps: 27 h

Start
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What changes: The cream is separated off and kept; the skimmed buffalo milk goes on

Step 1 of 9
Skim the milk
Time
up to 3 h
Set
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
Lactic acid bacteria
Streptococcus

For the creme type the milk is fully skimmed with a separator and the cream kept for frying; for the manteiga type the whole milk is soured and the cream that rises is skimmed off later.

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

Buffalo milk, skimmed for the creme type, gets 0.5–1% of the previous day's whey and is left at room temperature overnight to sour and set on its own. The curd is drained, washed with water and then with hot milk until it binds, pressed, ground and salted at 1–2%. It is then fried with the cream (or, for the manteiga type, with home-made butter) to at least 80 °C and moulded, with no ripening. Made in 9 steps over 27 h. The longest step, sour and set overnight, takes up to 24 h (ADEPARÁ (Pará state agricultural defence agen…). Salt is 1–2 % (ADEPARÁ (Pará state agricultural defence agen…). Lactic bacteria carried in the previous day's whey and the raw milk; Streptococcus was the dominant genus in a survey of Marajó cheese does most of the fermenting.

Key numbers
Main stepup to 24 hSet[marajo-portaria]Sour and set overnight
Temperatureat least 80 °CSet[marajo-portaria][penna2021]Fry with cream or butter
Salt1–2 %Set[marajo-portaria]Salt

What makes this one different

The milk sets by souring alone, with no rennet. The curd is then washed, ground and fried with cream or butter, so it is a cooked acid-curd cheese rather than a ripened one.

Milk
Buffalo milk, with at most 40% cow milk
Ripening
None; sold fresh after moulding
Composition
Moisture 35–50%, total fat at most 40%, fat in dry matter at most 65%, salt 1–2%

Related ferments

Variants

  • Tipo cremeSkimmed milk is soured; the separated cream is fried into the curd.
  • Tipo manteigaWhole milk is soured; the cream that rises is churned into butter, clarified and fried into the curd.

Safety

The curd must reach at least 80 °C for 15 seconds during frying, the step the regulation names as critical. The previous day's whey raises acidity to hold back Staphylococcus aureus. The regulation caps the label shelf life the producer sets at 30 days for refrigerated cheese, 10 days for vacuum-packed or sealed cheese kept at room temperature, and 7 days for other room-temperature packs, unless a technical study supports longer.

Hazards the sources name: Staphylococcus aureus (toxin), which the whey starter's acidity is meant to keep in check.

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

Cheese has been made on Marajó island for more than 200 years, at first from cow milk. A semi-industrial dairy opened in 2001, and in 2013 the state set production rules for the two artisanal types. A 2006 thesis adds that cheese-making on Marajó predates the buffalo, which farmer Vicente Chermont de Miranda brought to the island in 1895. Buffalo milk was then mixed into the cow-milk cheese. The butter type was made first, on farms in Cachoeira do Arari and Soure, and the cream type followed when a cream separator was imported from Holland.

  1. [marajo-portaria] ADEPARÁ (Pará state agricultural defence agency), Portaria nº 418 of 26 February 2013, Regulamento Técnico de Produção do Queijo do Marajó, annexes I-V (DOE-PA 7 March 2013), text as reproduced by LegisWeb. A binding technical regulation.spec
  2. [penna2021] Penna A.L.B., Gigante M.L., Todorov S.D. 2021, Artisanal Brazilian Cheeses, History, Marketing, Technological and Microbiological Aspects, Foods 10(7):1562paper
  3. [figueiredo2006] Figueiredo E.L. 2006, Elaboração e caracterização do "queijo Marajó", tipo creme, de leite de búfala, visando sua padronização, master's dissertation in Animal Science, Universidade Federal do Pará / Embrapa Amazônia Oriental / UFRA, Belémpaper