Exposing cheese to round-the-clock music could give it more flavour and hip-hop might be better than Mozart, Swiss researchers have found.
Nine wheels of Emmental cheese weighing 10 kg each were placed in separate wooden crates last September to test the impact of music on flavour and aroma.
The cheese was exposed 24 hours a day to A Tribe Called Quest’s hip-hop track We Got it From Here, Mozart’s Magic Flute opera or Led Zeppelin’s rock classic Stairway to Heaven.
One wheel was played the throbbing techno of Vril’s UV and another Yello’s dark ambient piece Monolith.
Soundwaves at low, medium and high frequencies were played for three others while one wheel was left in peace.
“The most obvious differences were observed in strength of flavour, smell and taste,” Bern University of Arts researchers said, in reporting the findings of a culinary jury which did blind-tasting. “The hip-hop sample topped the list of all cheese exposed to music in terms of fruitiness...(it) was the strongest of these in terms of smell and taste.”
Expert jury
Benjamin Luzuy, a Swiss TV chief and jury member, said, “The differences were very clear, in term of texture, taste, the appearance, there was really something very different.”
The experiment, instead of using loudspeakers, used mini transmitters to conduct the energy of the music into the cheese.
“All the energy is directly resonating inside of the cheese,” said Michael Harenberg of Bern University of Arts.
Beat Wampfler, the cheesemaker behind the project, said the cheeses were tested twice by the jury and both times the results were more or less the same.
He said the experiment would now focus on hip-hop. “The idea is now to take 5 or 10 cheeses and put hip-hop on them and then compare.”