About

“Cheese is milk's leap toward immortality.”

Clifton Fadiman

Cheese Science Toolkit is intended to be a science guidebook for those who have a special place in their heart for cheese. The intended audience are those who interact with cheese after it's made: cheesemongers, cheese buyers, and all-around curd nerds. Each of the posts will focus on a particular cheese science topic, with no special attention to the order or sequence of subjects. Cheese Science Toolkit is trying to address the severe knowledge gap on the internet when searching for information about cheese science.

Some very well-written cheese blogs skim the surface of certain specific topics, and of course you can find published textbooks and scientific journal articles, but there was no middle-ground. The hope is that Cheese Science Toolkit can serve that purpose. Posting information that has good depth along with bredth of coverage.

The posts aren’t meant to be a dissertation-length final word on a certain topic, but rather a decent overview. The idea behind this approach was that a cheesemonger, cheese enthusiast, or culinary professional would read the online posts to learn about an area of the cheese science realm.

Most of the posts are going to assume the reader has a base-level of cheese knowledge. Things like the basic types of cheese and essential steps of cheese making would be good to know before diving in. When at all possible, information will come from academic sources or industry experts.

About the Author

Hi there, I'm Pat. I'm a food scientist whose passion in life is understanding dairy products and spreading the good word of the curd. You can contact me via my personal website. In my free time I freelance as a web designer and front-end developer.

About the Site

Cheese Science Toolkit's frontend is using bootstrap with some modifications. On the backend of things, many of the pages are compiled using Jekyll and/or various server side includes (more of the latter really at this point). The topics section on the homepage uses isotope.js. Many of the interactive elements on the site were built using jQuery, D3.js, List.js, twentytwenty.js, Highcharts.js, and various other javascript libraries.

The chemical structures are made using ChemDraw. The various graphics and drawings are made in Adobe Illustrator. Animations are made using Adobe Animate. Molecular models are generated using 3Dmol.js.

The videos are made using Camtasia, Adobe Photoshop, and a Wacom tablet. Ambient noise removal is done using Audacity.