What is lactose?

Lactose is a sugar naturally present in milk.

How does it affect the taste of cheese?

Lactose has no effect on the taste of cheese. The taste remains the same whether a cheese contains lactose or does not.

How do you “delactify” a cheese?

Specialty cheeses

Lactose is a sugar naturally present in milk. To remove it, we undertake “delactification”, a step that takes place at the beginning of the Gouda cheesemaking process. When the milks starts to curdle, we remove a part of the lactoserum (also called whey) by rinsing the curds with water.

After this step a small amount of lactose is still present in the cheese. During maturation, the remaining lactose is divided by the ferments (bacteria) into two easily digested sugars, namely glucose and galactose. This explains why our ripened products have always been lactose free.

This procedure is a step that has characterized our cheeses since the very beginning. We have always produced our specialty cheeses in this way.

Fresh cheeses

The procedure is different for unripened (fresh) cheeses, since they do not undergo a maturation period. To obtain a lactose-free fresh cheese, we have adapted the rinsing process for the curds in a manner that removes the whey ensuring that lactose is no longer detectable.

Nothing is added to a cheese in order to render it lactose free. It all happens naturally during the cheesemaking process.

Our Louis Cyr cheese is made with milk that comes from cows fed a diet consisting mostly of dry hay. We have selected farms that meet this criteria specifically. We chose this milk as we were inspired by traditional European cheesemaking methods. Since a cheese is made mostly of milk, the taste of the milk is reflected in the final product. Our goal with this new cheese of ours was to stand out from our other products.