GEAs Discovery Plus is a new concept for the production of pasta filata cheese.

The low pressure steam stretching process allows users to balance the proportion of steam and water used in the cooking process to match the requirements of the recipe. This helps to retain fats and proteins that would otherwise have been lost, and minimises the power requirements of the process.

The stretching process for pasta filata cheese is necessary to give products such as mozzarella and pizza cheese their characteristically stringy, stretchy quality. Traditionally this is done by heating the commercial or milk curds in hot water prior to the stretching process. However, when curds are treated with hot water some of the fats and proteins inevitably leach away into the water. Although this can be recovered later it requires an additional, expensive process. By comparison, treating with steam retains more of the natural nutrients in the curd with no need for a recovery process.