Cheese-making processes

After the cheese making process the sweet whey is produced, it is further processed by reverse osmosis to increase the solids content from approximately 5.5% (w/w) to... 

Olson, N, F. 1975. Mechanized and continuous cheese making processes for cheddar and other ripened cheese. J. Dairy Sci. 58, 1015-1021. 

People have made use of enzymes in reactions for thousands of years, for instance in fermentation and cheese-making processes, but it is only recently that their identity and the importance of their role has been recognised and understood. 

A historical use of enzymes is the use of cow stomachs, containing the enzyme rennin, to curdle milk and initiate the cheese-making process. Enzymes are now applied commercially on both large and small scales. The three major categories for commercial production are industrial enzymes, analytical enzymes, and medical enzymes. Industrial enzymes are applied in tons, while analytical and medical enzymes are applied in the range of milligrams to grams. 

Cheese Whey Protein Recovery. Perhaps the best publicized application for UF is in cheese whey processing. "Cheese whey" is the supernatant liquid produced in the cheese making process after precipitation of casein from milk. There are two types of whey "sweet" whey (minimum pH of 5.6) results when rennet-type enzymes are used to coagulate the casein to form Gouda and Cheddar cheeses ... 

Lactose is synthesized in the mammary (milk-producing) glands of mammals. The milk of such animals contains an enzyme called lactose synthetase, which acts on the compound uridine diphosphate D-galactose to produce lactose. The compound is obtained commercially from whey, a byproduct of the cheese-making process. The solids in whey contain about 70 percent lactose by weight. These solids are... 

The environmental benefits are (1) cheese makers are no longer dependent upon enzymes recovered from slaughtered calves and lambs for production of rennet needed for most cheese making processes, and (2) based on current demands for chymosin, commercial needs for rennet could not be met from animal sources. The consumer benefits are (1) plentiful, consistently high quality enzyme chymosin is available at low prices that help assure availability of excellent cheeses at a reasonable cost and (2) people who follow kosher and vegetarian eating practices can consume cheese since the enzyme is from a microbe and not a calf. 

Caseins are quantitatively the most important protein components in bovine milk. This protein complex, known as a micelle, comprises four different caseins (asi-, as2-, 3-, and /c-caseins), which are held together by non-covalent interactions and appear as a highly stabilized dispersion in mUk. " During the classical cheese making process, it is the casein fraction that constitutes the cheese curd after the enzyme-triggered milk coagulation step. 

Siren and whistle systems are not widely used in industrial applications. In liquid applications, the whistles constitute a powerful tool for mixing and homogenization (Mason and Lorimer, 2002), and for this reason they have been applied to cheese-making processes or in the sauce industry to achieve stable emulsions, such as mayonnaise or ketchup (Mason, 1998). Sirens are very rarely applied in a gas medium, most likely due to the fact that the working frequency of these systems is within the human hearing range, so that noise makes the industrial operation difficult. An example was provided by Da Mota and Palau (1999), who used a siren system to improve onion drying at low frequencies (1.6 and 3.2 kHz). 

Licitra, G., Ogier, J.C., Parayre, S., et al. (2007) Variability of bacterial biofilms of the tina wood vats used in the ragusano cheese-making process. Appl Environ Microbiol 73, 6980-6987. 

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