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Cheese from Yunnan, China

Rubing (milk cake)乳饼

Rubing is a firm, fresh Yunnan cheese made by heating goat milk and curdling it with sour whey or a vine extract, then pressing the curd into a block. It is a boundary entry. The curd is set by acid and heat, but the sour whey that sets it is itself a lactic ferment.

A short entry: the sources we found record only what is said here about Rubing itself.

Short entryCheese

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedWhat goes in. No source gives amounts for this ferment.
goat milk
cow milk (often used in Jianchuan)
StarterSani makers use a little of the previous day's whey left to sour (vinegar if none); Bai makers use naiteng, an extract boiled from the dried stems and leaves of a cultivated vine (Allen and Allen 2005)
Start
Drag the bar or press Play

What changes: Goat milk is heated in a pot

Step 1 of 3
Heat the goat milk
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
Lactic acid bacteria
Lactobacillus plantarum
Weissella confusa
L. delbrueckii
L. hilgardii

Output: hot milk.

Flavour
goaty cooked milk
Texture
liquid
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

heat kills most milk bacteria

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

Rubing is a firm, fresh Yunnan cheese made by heating goat milk and curdling it with sour whey or a vine extract, then pressing the curd into a block. It is a boundary entry. The curd is set by acid and heat, but the sour whey that sets it is itself a lactic ferment. Lactobacillus plantarum (19.18 % of isolates) and Weissella confusa (15.07 %) in rubing and its sour whey and Lactobacillus delbrueckii, Lentilactobacillus hilgardii and Lacticaseibacillus paracasei, rich in the fermented whey do most of the fermenting.

What makes this one different

Rubing is curdled with sour whey or a vine extract; like paneer it is set by heat and acid and pressed into a block. Its close relative rushan is stretched and dried into sheets; rubing is pressed into a block.

Composition (lab cow-milk version)
Moisture 52.94 %, protein 20.09 %, fat 22.54 % in an optimised cow-milk process

Related ferments

Variants

  • Fermented-acidification rubingMade by fermented acidification instead of the traditional direct acidification; studied for digestion and peptides.
  • Plant-protease rubing (lab)Cow milk set with protease from Dregea sinensis var. corrugata stems plus citric acid at 83.25 °C.

Safety

The fermented whey is rich in lactic bacteria, but one metagenomic study found Escherichia coli abundant in the cheese itself, and S. aureus was found in 29 % of samples in another. Total biogenic amines were low (4.69 mg/kg in cheese).

Hazards the sources name: Escherichia coli (high abundance in rubing by metagenomics); Staphylococcus aureus (in 18 of 62 rubing samples).

History and sources

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

Wei et al. (2022) describe rubing as a Chinese PDO cheese eaten for more than six hundred years.

  1. [wp] Wikipedia, Rubing (citing Allen & Allen, Mozzarella of the East: cheese-making and Bai culture, SIL International)wiki
  2. [yang2013] Yang X. et al. 2013, identification and diversity of lactic acid bacteria in rubing and sour whey from the Sani area of Yunnan, Modern Food Science and Technology 29(9):2131–2140 (abstract)paper
  3. [yang2026] Yang S. et al. 2026, Metagenomic sequencing reveals the similarities and differences in microbial community structure and diversity between fermented whey and Rubing cheese, a fresh goat milk cheese, Food Research International 237:119400 (abstract)paper
  4. [prabakusuma2021] Prabakusuma A.S. et al. 2021, Prevalence and antimicrobial resistance profiling of Staphylococcus aureus isolated from traditional cheese in Yunnan, China, 3 Biotech 12(1):1paper
  5. [tao2017] Tao L., Pan X., Lin J., Wang H., Huang A. 2017, Optimization of processing parameters and nutritive composition analysis of milk cake (Chinese cheese), Food Science (食品科学) 38(6):221–229, doi:10.7506/spkx1002-6630-201706035 (abstract)paper
  6. [allen2005] Allen B., Allen S. 2005, Mozzarella of the East (Cheese-making and Bai culture), SIL International, Ethnorêma 1/2005paper
  7. [wei2022] Wei G. et al. 2022, Insights into in vitro digestion properties and peptide profiling of Chinese rubing PDO cheese prepared using different acidification technology, Food Research International 158:111564 (abstract)paper