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Cheese from Lombardy, northern Italy

Stracchino / Crescenzacrescenza

Crescenza is a fresh, rindless Italian soft cheese of pasteurised cow milk, soured with Streptococcus thermophilus and set with rennet at about 38 °C. The soft curd is moulded, kept warm until it reaches pH 5.2, brined briefly and chilled for about a week. It is eaten fresh, unlike the stracchino cheeses that ripen for about 20 days.

Recipe

Amounts from a sourceAmounts are for a 10 l laboratory vat that follows the industrial process (Tidona et al. 2020). Dairies scale them to their vats.
Cow milkPasteurised at 73 °C for 16 s in the lab trial, whose reference milk had 3.9 % fat and 3.45 % protein; the Lombardy sheet says Crescenza is made only from whole cow milk[tidona2020][lombardia-pat]
Streptococcus thermophilus starter2.5 % of the milk weightA commercial culture grown the day before to about pH 5[tidona2020][chirico2014]
Rennet (220 IMCU/ml)0.27 ml per litre of milk[tidona2020]
Brine of 15 % salt[tidona2020]
StarterStreptococcus thermophilus culture (a commercial culture in the laboratory trial; the Lombardy sheet says a natural milk starter is added to the pasteurised milk)

Total time across the recorded steps: 7 days

Start
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37–73 °C

What changes: The milk is pasteurised at 73 °C, then cooled close to 38 °C

Step 1 of 6
Pasteurise the milk and cool it to setting temperature
Time
0.3 min
Reported
Temperature
37–73 °C
Reported
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
S. thermophilus

Output: pasteurised milk at setting temperature.

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

Crescenza is a fresh, rindless Italian soft cheese of pasteurised cow milk, soured with Streptococcus thermophilus and set with rennet at about 38 °C. The soft curd is moulded, kept warm until it reaches pH 5.2, brined briefly and chilled for about a week. It is eaten fresh, unlike the stracchino cheeses that ripen for about 20 days. Made in 6 steps over 7 days. The longest step, chill to finish draining, takes 7 days (Tidona F 2020) and runs at 4 °C (Tidona F 2020). Salt is 15 % (Tidona F 2020). Streptococcus thermophilus does most of the fermenting.

Key numbers
Main step7 daysReported[tidona2020]Chill to finish draining
Temperature4 °CReported[tidona2020]Chill to finish draining
Salt15 %Reported[tidona2020]Brine briefly
AciditypH 5.2Reported[tidona2020]Mould and keep warm until the curd sours

What makes this one different

Crescenza is a stracchino cheese eaten fresh, without the ripening of about 20 days that other members of the stracchino family get. In the laboratory trial it is set warm, at 38.5 °C, with rennet and a Streptococcus thermophilus starter.

Milk
Pasteurised cow milk
Ripening
None; chilled about 7 days, then sold fresh with a shelf life of about 20 days
Moisture
About 58 % (the moisture the study used as its reference value to adjust cheese yield)

Related ferments

Variants

  • Ripened stracchinoChirico et al. 2014 say other stracchino cheeses ripen for about 20 days; see stracchino-tipico for an alpine one.

Safety

In the laboratory study the milk was pasteurised at 73 °C for 16 seconds, the cheese was chilled at 4 °C for 7 days, and its shelf life was about 20 days. The Lombardy sheet says Crescenza must be kept in a refrigerator and used within a few days of making. The CDC says people at higher risk, including pregnant women, people 65 or older and people with weak immunity, should avoid unheated queso fresco-type cheeses and similar fresh, soft cheeses, even when made with pasteurised milk. It does not name this cheese, and it lists cream cheese and mozzarella made with pasteurised milk among safer choices.

History and sources

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

Crescenza output is about 28,000 tonnes a year, about 30 % of Italian soft cheeses without a PDO (Tidona et al. 2020). The Lombardy traditional-product sheet (2008) says the cheese comes from the Po plain south of Milan, in the provinces of Lodi and Pavia, which are known for soft cheeses, and is now made almost entirely industrially. It says the name may come from the Lodi word carsenza for a flat bread, because bread and cheese were made in the same or similar moulds, and it places Crescenza in the stracchino family, made by tradition when tired cows came down from the Alps in autumn.

  1. [tidona2020] Tidona F., Francolino S., Ghiglietti R. et al. 2020, Application of recombined milk to produce Crescenza-type cheese in laboratory-scale cheesemaking, Foods 9(7):928, doi:10.3390/foods9070928paper
  2. [chirico2014] Chirico D., Gorla A., Verga V. et al. 2014, Bacteriophage-insensitive mutants for high quality Crescenza manufacture, Frontiers in Microbiology 5:201, doi:10.3389/fmicb.2014.00201paper
  3. [lombardia-pat] Regione Lombardia, Schede prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali, Allegato B to DDUO n. 3392 of 7 April 2008, 'Crescenza' (copy hosted by ONAF)gov
  4. [cdc-listeria] US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Preventing Listeria Infectiongov