How they saved the holes in Swiss cheese
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- čas přidán 30. 04. 2023
- Agroscope is a Swiss government-backed agricultural research lab. It's got a lot of other resarch projects too, but it also keeps a backup of the Swiss cheese bacterial cultures... just in käse. ■ Agroscope: www.agroscope.admin.ch/agrosc...
Camera: Tobias Buchmann
Editor: Michelle Martin / mrsmmartin
Local production by Viven viven.ch
Thanks to Rafael Ferrara and Remo Schmidt for the suggestion!
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This video has a correction: the second interviewee is Noam Shani. I accidentally copied-and-pasted the wrong name, and it somehow got through all the video checks. Apologies to Dr. Shani!
Perfect!
Hay is a carbohydrate, is the hay digested during fermentation? If so, is the volume of a CO2 bubble dependant on the size of the hay particle? Can you tell how big a hay particle was based on the size of its bubble?
Sometimes the holes in the Swiss cheese just all align - and such errors slip through all the checks... 🧀
hi
let's go vegan - please stop promoting products of animal abuse
The fact that we got good at making cheese, got too good to where it's too clean, then had to carefully and safely add barn dust to it in order to fix the cheese is absolutely amazing.
Switzerland: Suffering from Success
They're so successful they figured out a way to be less successful for more success
Remember something about a type of beer having the same issue. Seems like air flowing over the fermenting process from an old chimney had been adding some contaminates that added to its uniqueness.
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@@EdBruceWRX probably,
in belguim several beers can't be produces anywhere else then where they are, because they use the naturally occuring cultures to react SPONTANIOUSLY! thus a bit other naturally occuring yeast bacteria causes different reactions, and thus a slightly different beer..
also a lot of trapist beers use specific wells, with the water they start from partly determining the taste off the product :).
i renember they tried to move Hoegaarden, they at least claim they got the taste right, (i never saw an option to taste it, so it's only some claim by the brewery to me) but not the color, thus it was not a white beer anymore, they reversed to physical merger interely, Hoegaarden is brewed at it's original location again, and color was normal again too :) .
It was always marketed as a white beer, so even taste identicall, a blond version wouldn't do to hold up it's image!
and in that case i think they don't even know the true reason! but must be something naturally occuring in the water, air or other real local things..
This takes preserving your culture to a whole new level.
*hole
*bacterial culture
@@ShamblerDK angry upvote of the day
lmao actually
In more was than one, too!
There are swiss children out there who want to grow up and become cheese scientists. That is honestly such an incredible and hyperspecific job I'm slightly jealous
Hyperfixation at it's finest.
You can still aspire to become one now. Leave your current life behind, return to cheese scientist
@@RamenLlama evolve* because it is clearly the next step in human evolution
Most jobs for biochemistry grads are highly specific
I feel bad for them 😂 they can do something that actually matters orrrrr cheese…
For those who missed it, they use the same technology we use to detect bone and tissue damages for counting cheese holes.
i believe this technology hell all technology was made for cheese, we just repurposed it so we dont die while making it
TBH everything from the medical industry is either used or developed in other industries
@@staticbuilds7613 Or vice versa.
I’m reminded of a whisky distillery I visited in Islay, Scotland. They installed a new still as the century’s old one was on the way out.
They noticed they did not get the same flavour profiles, despite ensuring the product in was identical.
Turns out the old dents and ‘imperfections’ in the old still changed how the sprit distilled.
So they literally took a hammer to the new still and lo and behold they got the product out they wanted.
A perfect blend of science, tradition and art.
Sound like a story Tom ought to cover
Hah, just like how the Americans tried to recreate Fogbank for nuke renovation but found out they removed essential mpurities!
all of that is just science.
@@a2e5 I see you also watched that Half as Interesting video
lmao that's interesting
A lab dedicated to analysing exactly how the the holes in Swiss cheese are made is the most Swiss thing I've ever seen.
A government funded lab, no less.
Tge whole vid felt like a Monty Python skit.
Well it's not dedicated to just that, it's the whole cheese industry, which is more than just holes, and worth a lot to the Swiss economy
Swiss cheese not having holes because the milk is too clean is the most Swiss thing ever.
The Swiss have their Swiss Cheese Scientists, Americans have their Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and Canadians have their Maple Syrup Reserve including a Maple Syrup Heist.
@@safe-keeper1042 Yes it just to maintain control of trade sanctions it had nothing to do with the actual quality of the cheese.
As someone who's from Wisconsin this is EXACTLY what I want to see being researched.
Leave it to the cheese heads
@@1pcfred More from Swisconsin!
@@erik_griswold I like that Vermont cheddar myself.
Are you the inventors of spray cheese?
Fitting profile picture for one from Wisconsin
I've worked in protein crystallization, also a very finicky process. One lab can get crystals while another one doesn't despite using the same protocol. Crystals need something to grow around, a nucleation point, one lab where people smoked (this was long ago) got crystals while others didn't. It's the small things...
You think maybe it was the smoke particles acted as nucleation points?
@@janfilby7086 Yes. Another example where one lab got crystals and another one didn't it turned out the lab that got crystals had algae growing in the distilled water system. Sometimes a little dirt is a good thing, like how penicillin was discovered 🙂
You mean the dirt, helped to seed the crystal.. and then it went on from there ? Yeh... sometimes, it does need a little help.
I am surprised it ever was permitted to smoke in a laboratory. I (nonsmoker) utterly loathe smoking laws, but even I think that seems rather shocking.
@@salvadorromero9712 It was allowed to smoke on airplanes too in the not so good old days.
1 mg of hay powder per 1000 liters of milk? That's absolutely mind-bogglingly small but wonderfully incredible to learn, thanks so much
Bubbles are such weird/interesting things, in that they need nucleation sites to form. (Otherwise the gas stays dissolved in solution.) Lack of nucleation sites is why boiled water can explode if boiled in extremely smooth, clean vessels. (In laboratories, they use little porous ceramic boiling stones to go in their flawlessly smooth boiling flasks.) Or why they now laser-etch little imperfections into the bottom of beer glasses, to give the bubbles somewhere to form. It’s why Diet Coke goes berserk when you drop a Mentos into it (the surface has a huge amount of nucleation sites).
Yes but please use the correct units of furlongs per fortnite, the metric form of that value just doesn't have the same je ne sais quoi.
It makes sense in retrospect. Every hole is a separate nucleation site, and each nucleation site only needs one tiny particle (possibly as small as a single molecule) to happen. 1 milligram has a LOT of particles.
@@baldmaggots You mean slugs per cord. Furlongs per fortnight is unit of speed. Slugs per cord is unit of mass over volume.
@@baldmaggots- in the days when our grandparents were farming, they just used handsful per barrel.
While holes do not affect the taste (flavour), they do have great effect on texture. And texture is very important in forming the complete experience of the taste.
Regardless in and of how irrational this may seem to some, there is a psychology that can come into play here. It is not a "just in your head" kinda thing. For my Rubin Sandwich, the Swiss layer has to have holes.
@@davidalanjonesridge9874 Well, it really is "just in your head" as is the whole perception of the world. That doesn't mean it is to be ignored.
Holes certainly do affect the taste. Because many swiss cheese makers in the US use a different process that is quicker and doesn't form holes, which results in a much blander cheese, which shouldn't be called swiss cheese at all, it's false advertising, because the flavor intensity difference is huge. The holes themselves are indicative of flavor. Although many US manufacturers of "swiss" cheese, add holes mechanically with machines that effectively randomly cut small round pieces out of the cheese to simulate the holes. It's ridiculous.
What I like most in my cheese is no cheese.
@@Zaparter Smile and say "cheese".
Knowing that I could've been a _cheese scientist_ instead of a programmer is perhaps the most tragic thing I've ever learned... thanks, Tom. Thanks a lot. -_-;;
you can take it up as a hobby.
@@slewone4905that's now the same!
Never too late for a career change!
This is why I love this CZcamsr. Tom covers topics I never even imagined were a thing. Always so interesting and surprising.
To have one understand how particular the cheese industry is about their homemarket IN Switzerland one only has to make a little taste test with Gruyere cheese. The one you can buy in Germany, even though directly bordering Switzerland does not taste quite as distinct as the one you can get in Switzerland. I always suspect that is because they keep the real good stuff to themselves.
Same as French wine.
@@smelge same with any regional product tbh
@@Ruthro Unless the regional product gains popularity and happens to come from an exploited periphery country.
That is not my experience as someone who lives in Tessin: what I have noticed is that, as far as Italy is concerned, exported Swiss cheese tends to be tastier than the locally sold product. I wouldn't however be surprised if retailers were selling lower choice products here, though.
@@Ruthro I can easily point to American spirits and produce as the exception there, where we export the absolute best to other countries.
An advanced research lab dedicated to cheese. With scientists doing scans and mesurements of specific cheese attributes. And the cheese archive in there as well! It's just so brilliant! Not in a million years I would have thought I'd see anything like this.
Economies of scale
As a cheese enthusiast, this makes me proud to be Swiss. I always liked the high varieties we have here, as we have hard and soft cheeses. Also on a sidenote: the Swiss recently lost a legal battle in the US; they were fighting for the recognition of the AOP Gruyère so that cheesemakers in the US aren't allowed to falsely label their cheese as Gruyère. Unfortunately they lost this one. I'm still a bit mad about that.
Perhaps if y’all hadn’t behaved the way you did 85 years ago, and perhaps if you had sided with your neighbors during the Cold War, then things might be different today.
@@jpe1 mighty weird thing to say mate
@@jpe1I don't think, these are reasons for judges. I guess they had laws to support their conclusion.
@@ellis51773 why is calling out the deplorable behavior of the Swiss government during and after WWII “weird”?
@@jpe1 you know, since we’re amalgamating an entire country of people and meshing their beliefs with the acts of the government.
As a swiss person, im impressed how much we care about cheese, I mean, it is obvious, but to what lengths we go to make sure we always have good cheese is fascinating
Never stop caring about cheese. Swiss Cheese is God's gift to the Swiss, which the Swiss have shared with the world.
As a french person and big enthusiast of cheese, I am glad your country is going lengths caring this much about cheese.
Swiss cheese, the true gold we hide in the mountains ;)
Taking the "champagne of beer" incident to a whole new level…
You could say that we take it... very cheeseously. 😎
I'll show myself out. 😆
There is a metaphor in medicine (and other industries) about a Swiss Cheese model - where each layer of a service has certain vulnerabilities (holes) but using more layers helps stop there being a vulnerability which runs through the whole system unchecked (or a hole all the way through the cheese). I think the fact that the holes in Swiss cheese are created by very slight imperfections in the milk fits well with this analogy as the vulnerabilities of a system are often slight imperfections which how the real world works.
The thing is that it's not really swiss cheese if it has holes it's French cheese called Gruyère but anglos can't make the difference so it's all swiss cheese to them
So now we know services can be made more robust by refusing to add the hay!
@@ommsterlitz1805 Why would Gruyère cheese be French, when the town of Gruyères is in Switzerland?
@@kala_asi I'm looking forward to finding an issue and saying "Hey! That's hay!" and then going on a ramble about the Swiss cheese model and then about this video where they add hay to cheese to make the holes. I'm confident that the more longwinded a metaphor is the more effective it is.
Oh, wow! I heard the same metaphor with regard to cybersecurity! 😎🤘☮️
I think that "artificial imperfections" are always very entertaining to learn about.
Reminds me a bit of when Spotify had to make their "shuffle" less random, because people lost their mind when 2 similar songs happened to be played one after the other.
I have a special appreciation for buildings that look exactly like what they are. You introduce an agricultural research center and I see several buildings all topped with foliage and making use of the rooftops for said agriculture. Fair play.
City builder game aesthetics :D
Hah! The moment they said ‘impurities’ I immediately guessed stuff was too clean. Always interesting to see that we’re able to do stuff so well we unintentionally remove things we actually want.
It's hilarious to me that so much effort was poured into precise control and understanding over everything that goes into making Swiss cheese, that it unintentionally almost eliminated one of the most distinctive parts of it. And it was restored by adding dust back in.
“Our Swiss cheese is no longer full of holes, quick we must fix this to -sell consumers less product- regain its characteristic trait!”
@@protocetidit weighs the same
@@protocetid you have missed the point
@@advokatie Actually you people missed the point, I was half joking. I understand that even if the cheese maker gives you the same amount of cheese whether it has holes or not, as the person above claims, businesses are so greedy they will pull sleazy tricks like that from time to time.
They should make "unholy swiss cheese" as a brand. I'd buy it.
Jesus wouldn't be happy
@@lighghthe's long gone so we're completely fine
They do. Except it's not really cheese. It's pasteurized prepared cheese product. Kraft makes it, just like they make American cheese which isn't really cheese either. Although I think it would be "unholey".
Get more cheese per volume of cheese!
They could recruit Sam Smith for the ad campaign ;)
I'm so glad he explained the anatomy of one of my people's cultures. Cheese culture is very famous in the human world but I'm surprised that he dived deeper into Swiss, a personal favorite of mine. Bravo, Tom.
The human world? Did an alien just self-report
@@Thebestdruid You guys enslaved my cheese brethren and consume them. If anything, you guys are the aliens
And now I want some cheese
😢Me too,to bad i cant digest it
AFTER you finished that next video of yours ;)
Maybe it doesn't affect the taste, but it quite literally affects mouthfeel/texture on like, a macro scale. It's so much fun to bite into cheese holes.
Well techinically you can't bite into a cheese hole :P
@@PhoMyLife Yes you can. Your teeth go into the hole, so you are biting into it
@@absolutemattlad2701 so when you yawn does that mean you're biting into the air?
@@PhoMyLife yes, of course
@@ShirokiMaki I mean it’s different because we can’t see air but we know oxygen and nitrogen are there but the hole is an absence of a solid object
Whenever you see "Our X doesn't do Y as much anymore", it's 95% of the time because we've become so good at doing something, that we lose the small imperfections that make it great. I'm reminded of a recent HAI video in fact: Fogbank. We reverse-engineered the process of making it, but our modern processes are so pure and refined, that we lost the imperfections that made the compound so effective. Like the Swiss Cheesemakers here, we had to add it back in.
Flashback to Veritasium where Derek explained that Roman Concrete™ was mixed by hand which resulted in irregularities in the mixture and gave it some self-healing properties thanks to some uncured leftover unlike modern concrete which is more evenly mixed and cures more uniformly.
@@MarioFanGamer659 Wasn't roman concrete self healing cause they used saltwater?
Shows the importance of continually refining processes. You have to get good enough to manipulate something to be able to completely understand it.
Remember, no one likes something that's too perfect. Embrace your imperfections, and while it may seem you're lacking something, it's actually what makes you special.
*me talking to a wheel of Swiss cheese I'm about to devour*
I mean, without Tom Scott, I would have never imagined there would be a cheese bacteria archive. Keep doing the good work
I'm from Switzerland and want to say that your videos are very interesting! And even if you live in the same country, unless you're living at the places you visit or are a part of the topic discussed, you learn something new!
Also, fun fact a year after watching your video about the "falling rocks" sign in Brienz in a lecture about engineering geology at ETH this place was discussed, which I find very fun! Thanks to your video I already new something very specific which is also part of a univerity lecture...
I learned something I didn't know about my town from one of Tom's videos, and I've lived here for over fifty years.
@yyattt That there is gold buried on my local beach, although it was only done a few years ago. I hadn't heard a thing about it, although it apparently caused a stir locally. I think someone had to be extracted from the harbour mud by the local rescue team, to avoid getting drowned by the incoming tide.
If by interesting you mean anticlimactic.
Coincidence : right now the people of this very same location, Brienz (GR, not BE !), are urged to get ready to evacuate their village within three days, since there are about 2 millions m3 of rocks to rush down these next weeks…
The camera quality on this video is outstanding. Tom's come a long way from filming on a GoPro by the side of the road.
I love how genuinly and earnestly engaged and intrigued Tom is in every video. He's excited to be here!!!
May I just say, this video has the smoothest transition from the thumbnail to the actual video that I've ever seen? It's so seamless!
I wish my country was unproblematic enough that we could have a cheese-science laboratory
You severely underestimate how problematic my country can make cheese science. Check out the story of US Government Cheese.
It’s a good marker of a nations health. No cheese labs in Haiti
Why Tuesdays?
You're going to be very disappointed if you think that any country is "unproblematic". Nation building is not a victimless act.
@@Svettulf nobody said anything about Tuesday
The fact that they do all this stuff just to save holes in cheese is amazing
It's a big part of the brand!
Well it's also financially beneficial. You sell less cheese and can sell it as a feature.
@@watcher8582 they sell by weight not volume
Its preserving culture.
No pun intended
@@kneelesh48 It's not that easy. I mean go to any supermarket.
there is something that warms that heart of me that knows that we have bred specific cultures of bacteria for specific purposes since before we knew what bacteria was.
I remember following this as it happened in real time. The fact that something could be "too clean" was fairly new to the popular mind. (At least, that's how it was in the US, where I live. )
I'm getting my PhD in microbiology, immunology and virology so videos like this are always interesting. Reminds me of one of my favorite professors Dr. Oberg. He was our food micro prof and his research was cheese. He had studies just documenting all the types of bacteria in cheeses and he alone and found so many new types of bacteria that were otherwise unknown. I think he retired a year or 2 ago though.
Don’t believe you, you’re blonde
@@truegame142 what's your phd in?
@@truegame142 gross
lies
Are they finally teaching you guys how most cancers are caused by virus or do they still miss that part out?
Makes sense... but I never figured bacteria would need a nucleation site to produce carbon dioxide
Not to produce carbon dioxide, for it to be released from solution quickly enough in one location to form a bubble.
The bacteria produce CO2 regardless.
It just stays dissolved in the cheese otherwise, which I suppose might make it taste a bit more acidic?
I assume that the hay dust acts as a nucleation point, like dust particles seeding raindrops or tiny imperfections in a Champagne flute being the source of the bubbles.
@@kaitlyn__L it probably would taste more acidic if you ate it quickly after the cheese is formed - but cheeses rest for months so all the co2 will have bled out anyway. From both the holes and any remaining in solution.
It is always fascinating to see how "imperfections" in products that historically existed due to imprecision in methodology which we subsequently consciously removed prove to be extremely important to key features of the product: distilleries, rockets, and now cheeses.
After hearing the word cheese so much I decided to make a grilled cheese sandwich and it was delicious. Thank you Tom Scott
Absolutely fascinating Tom, I love it that at 66, (Me not you) you can still teach this old dog new and interesting stuff. Long may it continue.
Less awkward rephrase: "I love it that you can still teach this old dog, at 66, new and interesting stuff."
@@TheGreatAtario you know how to fill your evenings don't you.
@@TheGreatAtario thats way more awkward sounding
@@TheGreatAtario Let me try: "I love that you can teach a 66 year old dog like me new and interesting stuff at this age."
@@bingomachineImproved version: "I love how 66 year old dogs can teach me new stuff"
Now, Tom, this is _really_ something I did not now! (I know this is not the title of the series any more, but still...) So, only one part per billion of finely ground hay is what makes the difference! And they use CT to count cheese eyes, and DNA sequencing to check authenticity! Amazing!
It is somewhat terrifying how much leverage "big cheese" has. They can hire whole teams of scientists to maintain their elite status. It's like the high table in john wick, but instead of assassins, it's cheese oligarchs.
Tom smashing it again for weirdly interesting trivia. Bless you Tom.
It's interesting how imperfections become a part of tradition over time. The people who discovered swiss cheese many centuries ago might have preferred less imperfections, given the chance.
Fewer
i prefer the holeless cheese
so much of brewing, baking, and cheese making is wrapped up in traditions because they did not know how or why the food production worked. Superstition dominates because they thought if you didn't do the superstition the spirits would get angry at you and you didn't get any cheese
@@BlueCameNext yes, easier to work with when cooking, but esthetically I actually like the holes
Cheese: Less holes, smaller holes.
Switzerland Goverment: Save cheese holes!!!!!!
The distinction is to be made as Gruyère is not Emmental or what you call swiss cheese is not Swiss either if it has holes it's from France and it's also called Gruyère and made only in the Alp region
Fewer holes
For the US it would be "save the assholes", particularly in government.
@@ommsterlitz1805 you’re completely wrong
@@suspicioustumbleweed4760 Gruyère made in France origin is also protected as a Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) in the EU. At least do some search before saying ldlotlc stuff...
I can't describe how much I aprecciate you traveling to switzerland and explaining this incredible unheard of process, just for a funfact.
And for a trip to Switzerland
This video, along with the past few ones, have been beautifully shot/directed, even more so than usual!
Love the käsual joke in the description
"So, watcha in for?"
"Cheese fraud"
"...No, for real."
The logic of this issue is facinating
The cinematography in this episode is gorgeous! Props to the camera crew.
As a swiss I feel maximal pleasure! Amazing! Thank you Tom
I can't say "thank you" enough to these brave men and women who worked so hard to preserve the standard metaphor of safety incidents!
didnt know this had a level of fear or am i missing something?
@@FREEGTAMONEYPardon?
@@FREEGTAMONEY this system has more holes then swiss cheese
@@FREEGTAMONEY HiddenWindshield is joking about how "Swiss cheese" is a common descriptor of "something riddled with holes". Not that the actual making of Swiss cheese is dangerous.
@@LendriMujina thanks for explanation
This is one of the best and most interesting videos you have ever made! As someone with a background in food technology, this makes so much sense!
For some reason, I expect nothing less than this level of dedication by the Swiss.
that was a very well shot video. lots of fancy camera work, lots of flourish with the cheese
I've got a podcast! It's called Lateral, it's about interesting questions and answers, and you can listen free every week on podcast apps. You can follow it at lateralcast.com !
Thanks Tom!
full length video episodes when..
@@freespam9236 never apparently
"Wait! Pause! I think I've got it!" Listen to Lateral with friends. You won't regret it! It's so much fun to work out the answers with someone, or at least have some laughs at the crazy ideas that come to your mind.
I was going to submit a question about why the Blink 182 album broke the Geneva convention. Someone beat me to it. I'll have to come up with another.
Tom, you always continue to find the most interesting, random topics. I don’t know how you manage it! Thank you!
I've always wondered why the holes exist! This is amazing.
This must be one of the most fascinating videos I’ve ever seen from Tom. I love how we use science to bring back the past!
I said the same thing to myself. Like I spend as much of my day as possible learning new things, and it's not often a new incite or view point or science peaks as much intrigue as this video.
The video is interesting and informative as always, but can we appreciate the absolute gem of a reference in the thumbnail ("something un-holey")! Way to keep up with the trends, Tom
I am amazed at how the holes actually emerge. Thanks for clarifying the misconception!
Amazing job by the camera op and whoever directed, there were some outstanding takes here. Tom has come a long way since recording stuff with a gopro or iphone!
You seem to like Switzerland a lot. I hope you have many more projects with us. I always learn something new about us Swiss and like your view from „the outside“. 👍
I think it's moreso that Switzerland seems to like Tom Scott a lot. I'm sure there's an amount of Tom cold emailing companies asking if he can make videos with them, but I think based on Tom's popularity and openness in having people send in their queries to him, it looks like companies are the ones cold-emailing Tom to see if he wants to work with them haha!
That's so interesting about the milk. I wonder if because milk is cleaner these days and no hay particles get in it, that could be linked to the rise in hay pollen allergies, milk allergies and lactose intolerance? I tick 2/3 of those and have an autoimmune disease (coeliac) as well, and the steep rise in these things fascinates me.
it has been proven that living in too sterile environments will cause you to get more sick, because you're not exposed to everyday bacteria, so your immune system isn't tuned to dealing with them. But allergy to one thing isn't necessarily caused by not being exposed to that one thing. You can grow up in a humid/moldy house and end up allergic to cats for instance.
I mean we’re not supposed to drink it, it’s for cows
@@unethicallyvoid2888 Go tell that to prehistoric people.
@@ng.tr.s.p.1254 Worldwide, more people are lactose intolerant than not. The only reason that cultures with a heavy dairy consumption culture seem to be fine is that, well, they weren't. When milk and milk derived products are your only source of some very essential nutrients, the kids who couldn't digest it properly just straight up would've had a a very, very hard time reaching adulthood. Lactose intolerance eventually got eliminated from those ethnic groups as a result.
@@thesteelrodent1796 I used to get sick all of the time as a child. Even though I grew up on a farm, my parents kept me isolated from the rest of the world, but they also brought back germs every time they returned from work. Now that I go to work myself and am out among society at least 5 days a week, I rarely ever get sick. Go figure.
A bit like when we boiled liquids in a clean beaker in science classes. The beaker would bounce and thump while boiling… but if you dropped in some glass sphere it would allow bubbles to form around the contamination… and no bouncing and thumping while boiling. Both the spheres and the hay powder allowed bubbles to form during the reaction of the liquid.
Just a shout out to whoever helped you film this. The directing, lightning and editing is smooth and clean.
I lived in Switzerland for 3 years and I loved the cheese. I bought most of my weekly cheese every wednesday from a small food-truck in front of a Toom-Market. It came from a small dairy 75 km away.
There are no Toom-markets in Switzerland.
How much do you spend on cheese every week?
seems that you thought to live in Switzerland for 3 years, but accidentaly lived in Germany 😂
@@huberteichson8304 It was 2007 and I spend 100 CHF on average. More when I visited Germany or had night shift the week before.
Really enjoyed this vid. Just the fact that there are so many scientists testing cheese is amazing to me and actually quite lovely haha
How freaking cool is this story!?! And how on earth do you find them!?!? Thanks so much for bringing them to videos, I love your work.
So the eyes of cheese are a lot like pearls in oysters in more ways than one. I never would have thought!
5:33 tom didn't have to go cinematic with the moving camera while talking about cheese, but he still did anyway
I never thought there would be a place in the world where they x-ray cheese
Even cheese needs a check-up
Where I am from, most food products get x-rayed so that plastics and metals get detected if they get in them from the product line or elsewhere.
US airports?
0:28 That overhead shot is gorgeous and exhibit A for why more flat-topped buildings should have sod roofs.
This video is on hole new level for Tom Scott.
Almost fell off my chair when you mentioned Agroscope, because they have a site in my town! 😄
(One of the 12 sites and unfortunately not the one you've been to. The one in my place seems to be focused mainly on farming techniques and machines/utilities.)
I misread the title as "How they saWed the holes in Swiss cheese" and was very excited to learn about the art of sawing holes in cheese.
That's what they didn't allow Tom to see
Fascinating! That as a byproduct of hay dust, bacteria munched on it and made the holes!
YET! This story shows how things are lost when you become a conglomerate, you loose something! Reading my cheese book years ago, it mentioned that smaller, independent cheese producers, who made only a few wheels of cheese in a day, could use unpasteurized milk for even soft cheeses because if something went wrong, the cheese would smell and look bad. Since you did not have HUGE quantities such a problem would not ruin much. Also each dairy would have slightly different cultures dependent on the environment.
It's a good thing to see that Agroscope preserved all this genetic diversity. It allows them to try new things and perhaps come up with a different take on a type of Swiss cheese that becomes the next big thing!
Reminds me of the fogbank story. There too, the new process didn't have the impurities of the old process. Fascinating how much we still have to learn about the most simple things around us.
🎵 Dust in the cheese... all the holes are dust in cheese 🎵
Actually this reminds me of Fogbank, same situation, US couldn't make it because the impurities we're filtered, and they we're essential to make this chemical work as intended.
For some reason I found the cinematography of this episode particularly pleasant. And the subject was interesting too. Nice video!
That is so cool! The fact that contamination (slight as it was) was/is key to the holes is fascinating. Thanks!
so they saw their cheese suddenly gain more cheese per cheese and went "hold on, why is there more cheese per cheese and not the usual less cheese for more cheese?" which in turn made them research ways to remove cheese from more cheese so it goes from more cheese to less cheese per more cheese. and now the end result is they can now sell more cheese with less cheese.
...with sawdust.
This week I seem to have inadvertently learned the answer to the question "why is Swiss cheese like nuclear bombs?" - I heard elsewhere that the US military never wrote down how to make the bombs' secret ingredient "Fogbank" and all attempts to refurbish their old bombs failed... Until they realised the impurities in the old ingredients were what made it work.
No, that little factoid about nukes is completely false. In fact, it's so completely full of holes (see what I did there?) that it almost certainly originally came from some kind of joke or satire site.
@@HiddenWindshield Really? I've seen Fogbank discussed in numerous reputable sources as fact (as much as a well-kept national secret ever is at least), and can find none discrediting it, such as is the case with Red Mercury. Do you have any references that connect the discussions of Fogbank to a disreputable origin?
@@magma2050 Okay, so I initially dismissed "Fogbank" out of hand, because even during the cold war we knew what nukes were made of, and "Fogbank" wasn't one of those materials. But, as it turns out, Fogbank does exist. It isn't a component of nukes in general, but it is a component of certain specific designs.
(I had more info, but CZcams's being a pain again, so I had to cut it _way_ down to get the post to go through.)
There is an obscure novella from the 18th century which also talks about hunting an elusive impurity: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
This is such a great video!
Topic is awesome and the density is just magnificent!
Compliments to you and your team.
I must say, your videos make excellent company whilst I'm tirelessly working on some broken down computer. Your innovative interview subjects are always interesting and very well thought out and executed, keep up the awesome videos!
As a cheese lover, thank you.
This was very informative.
Well as somebody who like Swiss cheese and Swiss type cheeses this was fascinating it also explains why there was a sudden rise of small old Swiss cheese in the market a few years back. And putting hay powder a.k.a. grass a.k.a. greens in that makes sense and it's kind of cool.
When the leftist environmentalists learn that swizz cheese produces CO2 they'll run for a global ban of this poisonous and dangerous product
As a Swiss-American, I'm just overwhelmed with pride in my heritage right now.
I respect the care and passion they have for this.
Thank you for answering a question I've genuinely had for years (and was too lazy to research myself). Very interesting! Especially as I love Swiss cheeses. :D
Hard hitting internet journalism.
When you get serious about things, even simple stuff can get soo detailed!
I like that Siegenthaler N. has no stand-in at all. You go Siegenthaler, a lot of hope is placed on you keeping up the Fermenterraum!
I'm really enjoying his "world tour", glad he also featured my home country🇨🇭
To your closing statement, looks more like Emmentaler, because most of our over 600 Cheese variants don't have holes.
Great Video and I loved that you mentioned that we have different cheese variants!
I would love to show you some stuff in the Building Regulations from the Government side of things if you still manage to squeeze something in your schedule. For example how we're starting to plan areas with cold air production for summer heat :)
Emmentaler is literally the original "swiss cheese" and is what's exported around the world as swiss cheese.
this is easily one of the best channels in youtube.. at least for us who love very niche but also very interesting stories
Very cool! So glad to see things like this being protected and those centuries old strains being categorized and logged