What makes different types of cheese taste so different?
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There are two fundamentally different kinds of cheese. Acid set cheeses like paneer and ricotta, and rennet set cheeses like cheddar and parmesan. They use different chemicals to make the milk solidify.
Cheeses can be made from different milks that have different flavours. Cow’s milk, sheep’s milk, goat’s milk, and so on.
The milk can be processed in various ways before being turned into cheese. The cream can be separated and used to make cream cheese, or the whey left over from making a rennet cheese can be set with acid to make a type of ricotta.
Acid cheeses need an acid like lemon juice or vinegar, and different acids in different quantities taste different.
Rennet cheeses also need some acid, though less than acid set cheeses and they usually get it from bacteria cultures added to the milk. Different cultures produce different flavours. Some cultures require different temperatures such as the high temperature cultures used in Alpine cheeses like Emmental.
Different cheeses have different moisture content which affects their texture and flavour. This is the fundamental difference between Cheddar and Colby. Controlling the size of the curds, the pressure the cheese is pressed into shape, and intermediate steps like Cheddaring allow for different moisture contents.
Many rennet set cheeses are aged which does a number of things but a big one is giving the still live bacteria in it to grow very slowly at low temperature. Some aged cheeses also introduce mould, usually a strain of Penicillium which makes blue veins through the cheese and changes the flavour significantly.
Some fresh cheeses that aren’t aged are heated and shaped while in a plastic, not quite molten state. This can make for stretchy cheese like mozzarella.
Some cheeses just add extra flavourants like herbs, spices, or alcohol.
Cheese can also be altered after the fact. Some cheeses are smoked or emulsified.
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