Why is there so much salt in cheese?

Question

I want to reduce my salt intake for health reasons, especially from processed products such as cheese. I am aware is the crucial role that salt plays in the preservation of meat, it is not there just for flavour. Cheesemaking however does not rely on salt in the same way, and at least the simple young cheeses can be made perfectly well without any salt, even if their taste is not as good as with salt added.

Why does commercial cheese contain so much salt? It is purely a question of taste preferences, or does it play a functional role in commercial cheese production?

Answer 1

Salt plays several important roles in cheese making. Certainly flavor enhancement is chief among them, but it also works as a preservative (cheese making is a preservation process, after all). It also draws moisture from the curd and facilitates textural development. Finally, salt helps slow and regulate the fermentation process so that proper flavors develop.

There are many types of cheese, of course, and yes, some varieties can be made without salt. However, salt is a critical ingredient in the vast majority of cheeses.

Answer 2

Salt in cheesemaking serves five major purposes:

1. Preservation (same as for salted meat products).
2. Control of water content in the curd (high salt will draw water out of the curd).
3. Regulation of fermentation (almost every thing used for fermentation of cheese is salt sensitive, so high salt means less fermentation).
4. Regulation of pH (higher salt helps buffer against changes in pH). This feeds in to both the point above about regulation of fermentation and also affects the chemistry of any aging process the cheese undergoes.
5. Flavor enhancement.

It’s important to note that salt is not always added during the cheesemaking process, it also comes from the milk itself (whole milk actually has a relatively high salt content to begin with, and some cheesemaking techniques tend to concentrate the salt content), and in some cases from some of the processes involved in making the cheese (some types of fermentation or aging naturally produce some amount of salt as a byproduct).

It’s also important to note that salt content varies widely by variety of cheese, and even within varieties. For example, xynomizithra (known simply as ‘mizithra’ outside of Greece) has an extremely high salt content even compared to other cheeses (easily as high as 500mg in a 30g serving), while mascarpone often has a particularly low salt content (as low as 10mg per 30g serving). Most cheeses are somewhere in the 100-200mg per 30g range though, which is a sizable percentage of the suggested daily values for a healthy adult.

Answer 3

I'm writing up a couple of side points, additionally to the main ones which have been discussed in Austin Hemmelgarn's answer.

Natural salt content

Some of the salt is already there. Cows are mammals, and their body fluids contain a certain amount of salt. When you take 400 ml of milk, and make 100 g of cheese out of them (a typical proportion for a semihard cheese), you end up with 0.5 g of salt per 100 g of cheese. This is pretty much the minimum amount of salt which you're always going to have in there.

Almost all cheese also has salt added, but not all. I've actually had cheese made without extra salt, one of the larger supermarket brand organic Edamer used to be 0.5 per 100 g, but they've changed it by now to be more in the 0.7 to 1.0 range. The taste was somewhat unaccustomed, but I liked it well enough.

It may be all about taste, after all

As the other answer described, the salt has a lot of functions related to fermentation conditions, preservation and texture. It turns out that it's not the NaCl alone that can fulfill these functions, and there are, every now and again, people who attempt to make low-sodium cheese with alternative salts, such as potassium chloride. The cheese then hits all these desired points - but it also has a highly unusual taste, which most people dislike at first bite. So, strictly speaking, taste is the limiting factor which makes us use sodium chloride in cheese, specifically. The twist is that you still can't use less salt if you're OK with a less salty taste.

Young cheeses are irrelevant to the discussion

This is actually contained in the other answer if you read between the lines. Your statement that "at least the simple young cheeses can be made perfectly well without any salt" is misleading in this context, because young cheeses are different from mature cheeses in every way that's relevant to salting. They undergo a different fermentation (if any), they retain much more water, and they are highly perishable. So, they can be made without salt - but other cheeses need it.