Feta

Feta is a cheese that lives in brine, not a dry-rind wheel taken swimming later. Codex’s group standard for cheeses in brine: semi-hard to soft ripened cheeses, white to yellowish, compact enough to slice, few or no mechanical openings, no actual rind, ripened and preserved in brine until delivered to the consumer or prepacked ¹. Minimum fat in dry matter is 40 percent; minimum dry matter is 40 percent for the soft class and 52 percent for the semi-hard class ¹. The Codex name of the food is “Cheese in Brine” unless a national variety name is used ¹. 21 CFR Part 133, as listed, has no section titled feta. A tub labeled feta in U.S. commerce is not a named U.S. identity the way Cheddar is.

FAO’s traditional-product note places the origin in Greece and the make in sheep milk, alone or mixed with goat or cow. They call it a semi-hard cheese ripened in brine, with moisture they place at 45–55 percent and fat in dry matter at 45–59 percent ². Those figures are FAO’s traditional-technology notes, not a U.S. composition floor. FAO also records that industrial cow’s-milk versions made elsewhere differ from the traditional product ². Codex says no actual rind; FAO’s note says a very thin rind. Treat that as two descriptions of a surface that never becomes a dry coat, not as a dispute you need to pick.

Brine is the rind strategy #

FAO’s four stages still apply: coagulate, drain, salt, ripen ³. The salt job here is Salting cheese twice — dry salt on the pieces, then a salt-water bath that both seasons and keeps the paste from drying into a natural rind. Codex permits starter lactic cultures, enzymes, sodium chloride, water, and herbs or spices only where they are part of a named brine-cheese identity ¹. FAO’s traditional note adds mesophilic starter plus a thermophilic yoghurt culture before rennet ². Yogurt is therefore a culture cousin, not an identity for feta.

FAO’s vat times, pasteurization figures, and brine calendar describe a traditional product and are not a U.S. safety process or a license to age raw milk at home. See Food safety and Raw-milk cheese.

What to notice #

Paste should be white to pale, sliceable, moist, and a little crumbly at the cut — not rubbery like a pasta-filata pull and not a bloomy creamline. Taste salt first, then lactic tang. A lake of cloudy brine is the storage medium, not a defect by itself; a slimy, ammoniated paste is a different failure. Sheep milk’s density shows up as a richer, less “cow-sweet” paste; goat in the mix is the same species lever as Goat cheese.

Milk is the starting food. Curd is the drain. Salt in the brine is a preservation and flavor lever, not a marinade. Return to Cheese.