Queijo São Jorge

What is Queijo São Jorge?

Queijo São Jorge comes from the island of São Jorge in the Portuguese Azores. Cheese-making started there with settlement, when domesticated cattle arrived. The historian Gaspar Frutuoso wrote that the island's dairy cattle, sheep and goats yielded cheeses all year, the best of all the Azorean islands, because of the pastures. Flemish settlers led by Willem van der Haegen shaped the craft; they found the higher altitudes similar to the lands they had left and used them for cattle-raising and dairy grazing.

Milk production outran what a subsistence economy needed, so islanders turned excess milk into cheese as a food reserve. By the middle of the 18th century production had grown enough to export to the other islands and abroad. In the 1800s the Cunha da Silveira family brought in new techniques, and a hard cheese known as queijo da terra replaced the earlier soft and semi-hard types. The wheel shape dates to the end of the 18th century. A demarcated region was created in 1986, and a confraternity, the Confraria do Queijo de São Jorge, was formed in 1991 to sample cheeses for certification.

Production uses only raw dairy milk from the island. The milk is coagulated after acidification with lacto-serum saved from an earlier batch. The curd stands until it reaches the right consistency, then the lacto-serum is drained off and refined salt is added at 2.8 percent by weight. Wheels are numbered in sequence and given a producer code, so age and maker can be traced. They dry in chambers at ambient temperature, then move to climate-controlled rooms for 90 days. Maturation runs at 12 to 14 °C (54 to 57 °F) with 80 to 85 percent relative humidity and moderate ventilation, for at least three months. Special editions have been cured up to 36 months.

The finished cheese is cylindrical, 25 to 35 cm (9.8 to 13.8 in) across and 10 to 15 cm (3.9 to 5.9 in) tall, weighing 8 to 12 kilograms (18 to 26 lb). The rind is hard and dark yellow, sometimes flecked reddish-brown, smooth, with or without a paraffin or colorless plastic coating. Inside, the paste is yellowish and firm, at times brittle, carrying many small irregular eyes scattered unevenly. Moisture runs 49 to 63 percent and fat is at least 45 percent on a dry weight basis. The aroma and flavor form a strong clean bouquet, slightly spicy, and both sharpen as the cheese ages.

Wheels are graded by a chamber of tasters against the certification rules, then held at low temperatures until they go to market. About 1800 tonnes leave the island each year, from 800 producers working through nine milk processing cooperatives. The cheese is one of the pillars of the island economy.