Abstract
The aim of cheese manufacturers is to produce high quality and safe products. Along the food chain of “milk to cheese and food products”, milk is collected, transferred, and managed in a standardized manner; processing results in safe, ready-to-eat products, of high nutritional quality. Soft, acid cheeses are prepared in various regions of Greece, mainly from ewe milk, goat milk, or their mixtures. They are produced from the rennet and/or acid coagulation of thermally-treated, full-fat milk undergoing acidification/curdling and ripening. Xygalo Siteias is a Greek soft cheese, produced in the area of Siteia, Crete, where it was recognized as PDO in 2011. It is close—more in texture and less in taste—with other cream cheeses PDO of Greece, such as Pichtogalo of Chania, and Katiki Domokou, still it differs in the preparation technique as well as in its physicochemical, biochemical, microbiological, and organoleptic characteristics. In this review, we focus on the processing and characteristics of Xygalo Siteias, mentioning perspectives for the further microbiological characterization of the product, the determination of its shelf-life in combination with new packaging-materials, as well as the attention it deserves as a food important for breeders, the local economy, and consumers, since it is associated with the Cretan-Mediterranean diet type.
Highlights
It is considered to have a maximum moisture content of 75% and a maximum salt content of 1.5%, whilst its fat in dry matter is expected to range from 33% to 46%; the fat content of the sheep’s milk adjusted so that the fat content of the final product remains under 46%
Xygalo samples were collected by the local market and microbiological quality assessment was carried out by determining the mesophilic aerobic count (MAC) on Standard Plate Count Agar (PCA) agar after incubation at 32 ◦ C
Food and Agriculture (FAO) Organizations’ interest in small-ruminants breeds, parallels its concerns about the conservation of plant genetic resources (PGR), which culminated in the establishment of the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR) in 1974, and the FAO Commission for PGR in 1984
Summary
Cheese can be classified into certain categories based on texture, such as very hard, hard, semi-hard, and soft [1]. Concerning processing methods, soft cheeses are made from thermally treated or untreated milk [4], which is fermented by the use of specific bacteria; while rennet is occasionally used in order to produce a firmer texture. Fresh cheeses are ready for use as soon as the production process is complete, but ripened cheeses require maturing at a low temperature for up to one month or more. Due to the different cheese-making processes, the nutrient composition of each soft cheese differs. This is because of the characteristics and quality of the milk used in its production and may be affected by the production season, and by the selection and mixing of milks [5].
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