interesting question

[DougL]

Kind of an interesting question, but there doesn't seem to be an obvious board for it, so I'll throw it out here, which seems to be a well traveled one.

It is my understanding that whey is pretty nutritious. Lots of vitamins, minerals, and even some protein. Now, that would suggest that the cheese that produced this whey is not as nutritious as the milk that it was made from. I mean, those vitamins, minerals and protein in the whey that came from the milk aren't in the cheese. It would be interesting to get some numbers on this. How much of the nutritive value of milk ends up in whey, and not in cheese?

I always thought that cheese was as nutritious as the milk it was made from. Evidently not so.

[pastpawn]

Kind of an interesting question, but there doesn't seem to be an obvious board for it, so I'll throw it out here, which seems to be a well traveled one.

It is my understanding that whey is pretty nutritious. Lots of vitamins, minerals, and even some protein. Now, that would suggest that the cheese that produced this whey is not as nutritious as the milk that it was made from. I mean, those vitamins, minerals and protein in the whey that came from the milk aren't in the cheese. It would be interesting to get some numbers on this. How much of the nutritive value of milk ends up in whey, and not in cheese?

I always thought that cheese was as nutritious as the milk it was made from. Evidently not so.

It's a good question.  Whey tastes AWESOME - so buttery.  I've made ricotta from it, but it doesn't make much.  I might boil pasta in it the next time I make cheese.

[DougL]

Now that's remarkable. You can make ricotta from whey? Looking it up, you evidently just heat it up and maybe add citric acid and some salt. But, but, isn't that what I did to make the cheese that the whey came from? So the whey can make curds that didn't form when I originally made the cheese? And it does this without rennet. That sounds kinda bizarre. As in, the new curds just sort of forgot to form before?

[Andrew Marshallsay]

Now that's remarkable. You can make ricotta from whey? Looking it up, you evidently just heat it up and maybe add citric acid and some salt. But, but, isn't that what I did to make the cheese that the whey came from? So the whey can make curds that didn't form when I originally made the cheese? And it does this without rennet. That sounds kinda bizarre. As in, the new curds just sort of forgot to form before?

My understanding is that there are certain proteins in the whey which the rennet doesn't touch but which can be coagulated by acid. That is why the whey from some acidic cheeses, such as lactic cheeses, cannot be used to make ricotta.

[mikekchar]

Yeah, the mechanism for making curds with rennet is quite different than making curds with acid.  I don't really understand why you can't get near 100% yield for rennet, though.  I guess it has to do with the matrix of micelles not being completely efficient.  Remember that to make curds with rennet you are gluing a casein micelle to a calcium ion to a casein micelle to a calcium ion, etc, etc.  When you make curds with acid, you are just basically letting the casein clump together because each micelle no longer repels the other one.

But to answer the original question, the USDA has a database of nutrients for practically every food.  It's not always completely accurate, but it's pretty good.  Here is whey: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/101?n1=%7BQv%3D1%7D&fgcd=&man=&lfacet=&count=&max=&sort=&qlookup=&offset=&format=Full&new=&measureby=&Qv=1&ds=&qt=&qp=&qa=&qn=&q=&ing= (good grief that's a crappy URL ;-)

Here is cheddar cheese: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/9?n1=%7BQv%3D1%7D&fgcd=&man=&lfacet=&count=&max=&sort=&qlookup=&offset=&format=Full&new=&measureby=&Qv=1&ds=&qt=&qp=&qa=&qn=&q=&ing=

[pastpawn]

Now that's remarkable. You can make ricotta from whey? Looking it up, you evidently just heat it up and maybe add citric acid and some salt. But, but, isn't that what I did to make the cheese that the whey came from? So the whey can make curds that didn't form when I originally made the cheese? And it does this without rennet. That sounds kinda bizarre. As in, the new curds just sort of forgot to form before?

I get about a cup of ricotta from the whey from a 3g make.  Just follow online instructions for heat, citric acid, and salt.  You'll need a whey basket or cheesecloth-lined colander.  The whey curd structure is very loose and needs to drain for a while to form the ricotta.

[DougL]

Those USDA tables don't make it easy to compare. They list the content of cheddar per 100g, and the content of milk per 1 cup. Anyone want to tell me how many grams of cheddar come out of one cup of milk?

Fractionally, though, as a ratio of milk-to-cheese, cheese is much lower in carb and sugars than milk, and somewhat higher in calcium.

[River Bottom Farm]

Rough yield from a cup of milk would be 28.39g by my math (average yield is 1 lb per 1 gal) so 16 cups to 1lb converted to metric measures ...

BUT the point of making cheese from milk is not to concentrate the nutients but to preserve the milk into a shelf stable and tasty product. Of course the milk has more nutrients in it than what can be captured in cheese so if you want straight up nutrition go for the milk.

[mikekchar]

The third column in each table is the amount per 100g.  Here's the data for whole milk: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/70?n1=%7BQv%3D1%7D&fgcd=&man=&lfacet=&count=&max=&sort=&qlookup=&offset=&format=Full&new=&measureby=&Qv=1&ds=&qt=&qp=&qa=&qn=&q=&ing=

From there you can see that the weight of 1 cup of 3.25% whole milk is 244g per cup.  If we use RBF's yield of 28g per cup (not coincidentally 1 oz ;-) ), we have a yield of of about 11.5%.  This means that 100g of milk will yield 11.5g of cheese.  I'm going to assume that's pre-aging weight (which I think is a safe bet), so the amount of whey will be 88.5g (give or take a few grams).

You can put the amount that you want to measure in the table and press return to get the updated values.  So

100g whole milk: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/70?n1=%7BQv%3D1%7D&fgcd=&man=&lfacet=&count=&max=&sort=&qlookup=&offset=&format=Full&new=&measureby=&Qv=1&ds=&qt=&qp=&qa=&qn=&q=&ing=

11.5g cheddar cheese: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/9?man=&lfacet=&count=&max=&qlookup=&offset=&sort=&format=Full&reportfmt=other&rptfrm=&ndbno=&nutrient1=&nutrient2=&nutrient3=&subset=&totCount=&measureby=&Qv=.115&Q322394=1&Q322395=1&Q322396=1&Q322397=1&Q322398=1&Q322399=1&Qv=1&Q322394=1&Q322395=1&Q322396=1&Q322397=1&Q322398=1&Q322399=1

88.5g whey: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/101?man=&lfacet=&count=&max=&qlookup=&offset=&sort=&format=Full&reportfmt=other&rptfrm=&ndbno=&nutrient1=&nutrient2=&nutrient3=&subset=&totCount=&measureby=&Qv=.885&Q322675=1&Q322676=1&Qv=1&Q322675=1&Q322676=1

So we can compare the amounts to see if they make sense:

In order of milk, cheese, whey: Note that milk should equal cheese + whey.

Nutrient	Milk	Cheese	Whey	Comment
kcal	61	46	21	46 + 21 = 67. Pretty close.  Cheese is using higher fat milk (see below)
protein	3.15g	2.63g	0.67g	Missing some protein.  Probably whey is wrong
fat	3.25g	3.83g	0.08g	The cheese was made with higher fat milk (~3.9%, which makes sense)
sugars	5.05g	0.06g	4.53g	Most of the sugar ends up in the whey.  The rest is fermented by the starter culture.
calcium	113mg	82mg	91mg	The whey number is obviously wrong.

Google gives me 0.8g of protein and 38mg of calcium for 88.5g of whey, which fits our model a lot better.  We have to assume the USDA database is not completely accurate for whey, unfortunately.

But that gives you a ballpark.  You can look up other numbers in the links above.  Just be careful that some of the whey numbers in the DB seem to be completely wrong.  This is a general problem with the USDA DB.  The quality for uncommon foods is known to be quite poor.  But it's a free DB, so it's useful as long as you keep that in mind.

[mikekchar]

Ah... The problem with whey was actually *my* mistake.  I linked to *acid* whey, rather than *sweet* whey.  Acid whey is whey produced from yogurt.  That's why the calcium content is so high (when the pH gets really low, it dissolves a lot of the calcium phosphate from the casein).  Here is the correct link:

https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/01114?man=&lfacet=&count=&max=25&qlookup=whey+liquid&offset=&sort=default&format=Full&reportfmt=other&rptfrm=&ndbno=&nutrient1=&nutrient2=&nutrient3=&subset=&totCount=&measureby=&Qv=0.885&Q322679=1&Q322680=1&Qv=88.5&Q322679=1&Q322680=1

And the relevant values are:

24 kcal, 0.75g protein, 0.32g fat, 4.55g sugars, 42mg calcium.  Those number line up a lot better (helps to be looking at the right food).  I also realised that using 11.5 grams for the cheese is wrong because the cheese when measured would be post ageing weight.  So I guess about 5% less -- so we should be using 11 grams.  But I'm not going to bother recalculating all that because these are just ballpark numbers anyway.

[DougL]

I never said that cheese was about concentrating nutrients. But as noted, cheese has fewer nutrients than the amount of milk used to make that cheese. Simplistically, if cheese were just well preserved milk, they'd be the same. But they're not.

[mikekchar]

I find it quite interesting that the whey carries a lot less nutrients than I had previously assumed.  It's mostly sugar.  I really thought there would be a lot of protein left over because you always see ads for whey protein powders.  Conversely I had not anticipated how much sugar remains in the whey.  I would have thought that it would get mostly digested by the starter cultures.  Very interesting exercise.

[DougL]

The whey actually does still carry nutrients. You make ricotta cheese from whey. Not a lot, but that ricotta stuff is in the whey. Whey is nutritious. About 1% protein. About a third or a quarter as much as in milk. If you're gonna drink stuff for nutrients, drink milk. I guess they make protein powders from whey because they're too cheap to use anything with more protein.

This would suggest that cheese has 2/3 or 3/4 as much protein as the milk it was made from. If you want protein, drink milk.