One of the most noticeable features of Swiss cheese is these famous “eyes”. For over a century, people believed that bacterial growth creates gases that make holes in the cheese. Except that’s not quite true.
During the milking process, tiny hay particles stick to buckets and stay in the milk. By controlling the number of hay particles in milk used to make cheese, the scientists could control the size and number of holes that appeared. The specks of hay cause weakness in the curd structure and act as a nucleation site for the carbon dioxide bubbles produced by the bacteria in the cheese to form. The rind is tough enough that it traps the air bubbles inside the cheese and creates eyes. The traditional milk bucket being replaced with modern technology explains the “cheese blindness epidemic”.
This is a bigger deal than you think because the US Department of Agriculture has a grading system for Swiss cheeses (defined as “cheese made by the Swiss process or by any other procedure which produces a finished cheese having the same physical and chemical properties as cheese produced by the Swiss process”, not cheese from Switzerland) based on the size of the holes. Grade A requires cheese to have “uniformly distributed well-developed round or slightly oval-shaped eyes" between 6/16 to 13/16 of an inch (1 to 1.7 cm). This rule only applies to Swiss-style cheese sold in the U.S.
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