Food processors learned long ago how to make foods shelf stable. The focus today is making them both stable and tasty. That, in a nutshell, is what prompted Joseph E. Marcy to begin a quest 15 years ago to produce a high quality, grated Parmesan cheese with a flavor profile approximating fresh refrigerated Parmesan that was shelf stable. Early research paved the way to a grant from Dairy Management Inc. for a project begun in 1998 with Rusty Bishop and Mark Johnson, colleagues from the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Their work has produced an alternative aging method for the production of shelf-stable Parmesan that could see its first commercial application in the coming months.
Marcy is a professor in the food science and technology department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va. He has worked extensively on issues relating to food packaging and is a former business development manager at Rampart Packaging, now a division of Printpack. Marcy also is involved in food-processing projects and is affiliated with the Center for Advanced Processing and Packaging Studies at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C. Food Engineering recently spoke with Dr. Marcy to learn more about this new aging technique.