Soft Cheese and the Coagulant Question

Hard cheese carries its own requirement — gevinas yisroel — and the reason usually given is the coagulant: rennet taken from the stomach lining of an animal that was not slaughtered properly.

But the rule as ruled is wider than its reason. The Rema forbids even where the cheese was set with grasses, on the principle that the Sages did not distinguish between cases. Which raises the question this page is about: what happens to a product that uses no setting agent at all?

The position that treated them as butter

Soft cheese, cottage cheese and yoghurt were traditionally made without any added coagulant. The milk sours and sets on its own.

The ruling that followed from that — and it has governed practice for a long time — is that these products are in the category of butter rather than cheese, and so are simply outside the cheese requirement.

That position was adopted by the certification world broadly and has been the working basis for sixty years and more. It was accepted across the spectrum without serious challenge at the time, even though a question was later raised about it. It is the reason a great deal of commercially produced yoghurt and cottage cheese has been treated the way it has.

The supporting reasoning is that the prohibition has several stated causes, the prominent one being the animal-derived setting agent — and a product with no setting agent whatsoever cannot easily be brought inside it. Another line of argument observes that soft cheese in Talmudic times used no coagulant at all, and that using one is a recent development.

The position against

It was never unanimous, and the stringent argument is straightforward.

The Radbaz, asked about non-Jews' yoghurt, put it bluntly: what difference does it make whether the milk was set with tree resin or set by something that sours it? Either way the milk has set, and it is forbidden like cheese.

The Chochmas Adam runs the same way — even set with grasses, or formed on its own, it is forbidden, because the Sages did not distinguish. And the Aruch HaShulchan draws the conclusion explicitly: if setting with grasses is forbidden, then ordinary cheese with no setting at all is forbidden too.

The Seridei Eish takes a middle line worth noting, because it shows the distinction doing real work: where it is clear the cheese is made with no setting at all and everything happens by itself, it may be permitted in circumstances of genuine need. But where it is set by something else, even by grasses, it is not permitted except for the sick.

What changed, and why it matters to you

Here is the operative point, and it is a process fact rather than a halachic one.

Today a setting agent is commonly used in soft cheese as well.

Read that against everything above. The permissive position rests — entirely — on the premise that these products contain no coagulant. It is not a leniency about soft cheese as a category; it is a conclusion drawn from how soft cheese was made. Where a modern process adds a coagulant, the premise that carried the ruling is no longer true of that product.

This is the same shape as the argument about pasteurisation and mevushal: a ruling that depended on a factual state of the industry, and an industry that then changed. In both cases the halacha did not move. The process did, and moved the product out from under the ruling.

What a dairy plant should be able to answer

The practical consequence is that the category of your product does not settle its status. The process does. So for each soft-cheese or fermented dairy line:

1. Is any coagulant or setting agent used? This is the question — not the product name.
2. If so, what is it, and what is its origin? Animal, microbial, plant, or fermentation-produced.
3. Has it changed? A process that ran without one and now uses one has moved, and that is a change in the sense of when a supplier changes something — even though nothing on the ingredient panel may look different.
4. Does the product set on its own, or is it made to set? Acidification, culture and added enzyme are not the same answer.

The reason this catches producers is that the change is usually made for texture, yield or consistency — entirely ordinary process improvement, with no reason for anyone to flag it. It is exactly the kind of modification that never reaches a certifier because nobody involved had any reason to think it was one.

Which of these positions applies to your product, and what your line therefore requires, is a question for your certifying rav. What we can tell you is that the question turns on your coagulant, and that it is worth answering before anyone asks.