[Cheese] So whos the new guy ? / Suggestion for experiments

[Peter Næslund Møller]

First off: Jack Schmidling invited me to join this list after a short discussion about making cheese from recombined milk..

Bit of background:

I work for one of the largest dairy co-operatives in northern Europe.. The facility I work at makes semihard yellow cheese ( Edam/Gouda types ) from approx. 550 tons of milk per day. I also do a fair bit of concert sound reinforcement and audiovisual work, but thats probably not on topic here :-)

I came across Jack Schmidlings website about making cheese milk from milk powder, water and butter, and while the idea itself is sound I am not overly exited about using raw egg yolk as an emulsifier in something like cheese, where Salmonella etc. have very good growth conditions, so I suggested a trick we used for Feta cheese..

I dont know anything about your background in dairy technology, organic and protein chemistry, so I will make a brief explanation of the things involved first:

Milk fat is enclosed in a shell of phosforlipids that keeps the fat contained. One end of the shell molecules can stick to water, and the other can stick to fat - this is what emulsifiers ( and soap products ) are all about. 

When churning butter, you basically smash the shell on some of the fat globules releasing the fat.. The free fat sticks to the fat globules and basically glues them together. The surplus of phosforlipids is discharged with the buttermilk, wich ends up containing around 0.1% Lecitin ( the primary fat globule shell material )

On with the experiment:
I used to work at a place that made Feta style cheese w. vegetable fat instead of milk fat.

We usually mixed the milk in 100 ton batches, typically using around 20 tons of buttermilk + 3,5 tons of veggie oil and 76.5 tons of nearly fat free skimmed milk. 

The buttermilk was not from cultured butter and was close to free as it was a byproduct that would have been sold as animal feed if we hadnt used it..

Now.. We had to homogenise the milk very lightly ( you normally dont do that for regular yellow cheese ) in order to keep the fat in its emulsion. This was mainly because we sometimes stored the milk for ~48 hrs before using..

I have adapted the idea of using buttermilk as an emulsifier to icecream production ( industrial scale ) and managed to eliminate the use of emulsifiers completely..

I am guessing this should work in cheese production aswell, so if someone could try substituting regular skimmed milk powder for buttermilk powder, you should be able to get the fat dissolved in the milk without problems.

Buttermilk powder should be available at the places that also sell you 50 lbs bags of skimmed or whole milk powder.

I'd have loved to conduct a series of experiments, but we cant make cheese from anything less than 16 tons of milk at a time here, and obtaining fresh, uncultured buttermilk in those quantities would mean sending a truck on a 250 mile detour :-) Besides.. If we need milk at the dayjob we just call the head office and order a couple of transfer-loads from one of the other facilities..

Anyone care to try the experiment?
Questions ?
Comments?

/peter

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