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GENERAL CHEESE MAKING BOARDS (Specific Cheese Making in Boards above) => Discussion => Topic started by: Digitalsmgital on January 02, 2014, 02:23:26 PM

Title: A casein point
Post by: Digitalsmgital on January 02, 2014, 02:23:26 PM
So it has come to my attention that many factors apply to cheese flavor and texture, many of them under our control as cheese makers.

Yet so many of the final cheeses end up with varying degrees of free fatty acids, despite similar ingredients and treatments. I know that the addition of G. candidum and P. camemberti can allow the breakdown of fats, yet a cheese without these strains like parmesan can have three or four times the amounts of free fatty acids than a cheese like edam. Even a camembert will have half the amount!

Does the microbial makeup of P&H milk with the addition of a few starters allow for these differences, or is it the treatment of the cheese after the ripening phase that causes this?
Title: Re: A casein point
Post by: linuxboy on January 02, 2014, 02:54:43 PM
FFA formation is due to present lipases in milk, lipases created by starters, and lipases created by rind flora. The rest is time, which facilitates fat breakdown. starters, rind, and aging all matter.
Title: Re: A casein point
Post by: Geodyne on January 02, 2014, 09:43:38 PM
I'm really intrigued by this.

My body decided a number of years ago that it no longer wished to digest saturated fats, so I can't and don't really eat dairy products. Yes I know, I'm in the wrong hobby! But I love cheese, and I'll find that I can get away with a bit of, say, parmesan or one of my matured Cheshires, but I can't eat stilton, commercial mozzarella, camembert or "cheddar". I knew that was to do with fat content but hadn't registered the effect of free fatty acids.

Could someone point me in the direction of further research on the effect of lipase and lipase production from starters and rind flora for further reading? Books or otherwise?

Edited to add: apologies if I'm hijacking your thread DS.
Title: Re: A casein point
Post by: linuxboy on January 02, 2014, 11:55:01 PM
What do you want to know? It's basic stuff in the end. Fat hydrolizes in the presence of special kinds of proteins that break apart the triglyceride bond. This takes time. You can manipulate rate of breakdown with temp, amt of lipases, and water activity in cheese. Mix those three aspects together and call it done. Are you looking for FFA levels in various cheeses? I have a table of that somewhere... I think from Fox.
Title: Re: A casein point
Post by: Geodyne on January 03, 2014, 01:00:05 AM
Thanks linuxboy. The basics I understood, I just thought you may know of some specific papers that had studied this.

As it happens, and completely coincidentally, a colleague and fellow home-cheesemaker has just dropped a library copy of Fundamentals of Cheese Science on my desk because they thought I'd be interested. Sometimes it pays to work for a science organisation. There goes my productivity for the rest of the day as I try to work out the relation between FFAs, available lipases and the fat content of the final cheese.

There's a table of FFAs on pages 253-254, if anyone wanted to know. Unfortunately the preview on google books does not contain those pages.
Title: Re: A casein point
Post by: Digitalsmgital on January 03, 2014, 05:43:40 AM
Quote from: Geo link=topic=12312.msg94984#msg94984
Edited to add: apologies if I'm hijacking your thread DS.

This is why I posted it in the Discussions forum, knowing/hoping that others would join in!

Thanks for the reply, linuxboy!

I was more interested in the enzymatic reactions, inhibitors, and such as they pertain to the resulting flavor of the final product.

 Most of my favorite cheeses are aged and made with skimmed milk, so I was under the impression that it is the proteolysis on the rind,  rather than the LPL activity in the paste (breaking down those triglycerides into free fatties (oh, behave!) and these mysterious partial glycerides and yummy peptides), resulting in that heavenly product that I crave daily.

And doesn't P&H milk have lower levels of lipolysis activity than it's raw counterpart? Enough for us to worry, and compensate with longer aging?