Not sure where the best place to post this question but is there a better or less good time to add Ca Cl to the milk? Should I add this before I add the culture or after the culture has been added and if after should the calcium chloride be added immediately after or a few minutes before mixing the rennet? Thanks.
Hey Mr. Bernard,
I've been making cheese for a bit over a year and I have heard that you ought to add it an hour before adding rennet. BUT, I've just added it moments before rennet because to me, it is a chemical reaction, the calcium binding in the rennet. It isn't like culture that needs to grow for a while, it's just a chemical. So I add it any time previously to the rennet.
When I make my cheeses, I add the cultures, then the cacl2 in a 30% solution, then about an hour later, the rennet. That usually works well for me.
Thanks. I guess you helped clarify my question with your answer. Many recipes suggest adding the Ca Cl BEFORE inoculating with culture. Is there any advantage to that? Or is that simply a convention with no significance - and adding the Ca Cl after you add the culture makes no difference.. ?
Mr. Bernard, I've never actually heard there is a reason to add the cacl2 with cultures or before cultures or have it in the milk for any given length of time. Some recipes say add it with cultures, some, before, some after, and there is no reason given for why to do any of them regarding the calcium chloride reacting with the rennet.
If there is an actual reason to add it before the cultures or for an hour before rennet, then I just don't want to hear the directions to do it in a recipe, I want to hear the reason why I should do it at a particular time. Because I can't fathom the why.
So I've made 30 some kinds of cheese in 90 some batches and now I just add it when I add the cultures because it doesn't seem to matter one way or another, as long as I get it in there before the rennet. My success rate with cheeses is about 97% and my failures don't have to do with cacl2 and rennet mishaps.
I think I can say, you'll be safe adding cacl2 when you add your cultures. Or you can add the cacl2 after the cultures. Just get it in the milk, before the rennet. I'm no professional cheese maker. I'm an amateur cheese eater. :D I wish you luck!
One of the best regarded cheesemaking books is Gianaclis Caldwell's " Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking". She is very clear that the calcium chloride must be added before renneting and in her recipes she recommends adding the rennet 5 minutes before renneting. (I think that this is intended as a minimum time, but I couldn't find that on a quick flick through the book.)
Adding the calcium chloride before the rennet makes sense given its role in coagulation but I don't think there is any reason not to add it early in the process.
No difference in adding Calcium Chloride before of after the culture. It's the interaction with rennet that you are looking for. Calcium Chloride takes no time at all to diffuse into the milk.
Aha! That's the kind of answer I want to hear - someone who is prepared to say that it makes no difference whether I add the calcium chloride before or after I add the culture.... but I would really love to see the citation that supports such claims. My background is in academics and we cannot assert anything as a fact without supporting evidence... (but thanks Thewitt, much appreciate your post).
Calcium chloride is added to milk in order to help the casein micelles bind. Rennet contains an protease enzyme called chymosin. This enzyme cleaves the K-casein from the casein micelle, leaving the micelle negatively charged. It binds to something positively charged (usually calcium ions) to form a 3D mesh which we call curds. Unfortunately, when you heat treat milk in pasturisation, it precipitates calcium. This is where the calcium chloride comes in. Most salts of calcium (like gypsum or chalk) are not very soluble in water. Calcium chloride is an exception to that rule -- it's very soluble. You dissolve a little bit of calcium chloride, which then dissociates and provide the calcium ions you need to form the curds. Whether or not you need to use it depends on the milk -- if there is insufficient dissolved calcium in the milk, then there will be nothing for some of the casein to bind to, and you wont get a good strong curd. This is also why you don't need calcium chloride with raw milk (because it was never heat treated and the calcium was never precipitated in the first place).
The reason for adding the culture before you add the rennet is because the chymosin enzyme works better in certain pH ranges (unfortunately, I forget what the optimal range is, and google is failing me). If you wanted to, you could just add an acid like citric acid to get the same effect. However, we also want to reduce the lactose level at this phase (or else the cheese will get to acid later on), so that's why you add the bacteria and wait until it has slightly acidified the milk before proceeding.
If you need academic papers to back up these claims, the easiest way to get there is to look up all the chemically words in wikipedia. That will bury you in references :-) But there is a *better* way to proceed IMHO. Try it :-) These claims are actually very easy to demonstrate with experimentation. You don't need to make a cheese -- just experiment with 100ml or so of milk with each experiment. Try curdling the milk with just rennet. Add measured amounts of acid before setting the curd with rennet -- see if it makes a difference. Try acidifying milk with your cultures. Try it with and without calcium chloride. Does it affect the production of acid? You may think I'm being silly, but I'm serious. This is super fun and worth doing. When you are done you will *really* understand what's going on.
Quote from: Bernardsmith on June 04, 2018, 12:16:07 AM
Aha! That's the kind of answer I want to hear - someone who is prepared to say that it makes no difference whether I add the calcium chloride before or after I add the culture.... but I would really love to see the citation that supports such claims. My background is in academics and we cannot assert anything as a fact without supporting evidence... (but thanks Thewitt, much appreciate your post).
I'll keep that in mind, but likely won't respond to any more questions as I'm not likely to quote academic references. Sorry.
"academic references" ain't worth a pinch of coon sh** when compared to your kind of experience Thewitt.
Present company excepted of course, but "academic references" usually suggests statistically significant results that have been peer reviewed and which for all intents and purposes were collected under double blind conditions (the gold standard) while even "great experience" suggests anecdotal examples that may not include 100 percent of observed data and which may for many reasons be anything but typical.
The answear is though that it doesn't matter as long as the calcium is available and evenly distributed when the renneting happens. Many people add it to the pot before anything else, some even add it to the milk the night before if they are ripening the milk over night. You can follow the recepie and it will turn out fine any way you do it. The important thing is to add it to pasteurised milk (and not forget it) then mix it in well so it is available throughout the milk for coagulation
Benardsmith, with all due respect, the problem with your question is that it is on the order of "Will my cheese turn out badly if I cut my hair on a Thurday?". When people say, "No, it won't because there is no relationship between cheese and your hair (that anybody is aware of)", you respond with "Do you have any references to support your theory?". Of course there are no references to support the theory. Nobody would think to create such a reference because there is no particular reason to expect that there would be any relationship at all.
So the reverse question is: Why do you suspect that adding calcium chloride before you add cultures would make any difference at all? I'm not saying that it doesn't (I've never tested it and I am reasonably certain that *nobody* has ever tested it). I'm just saying that calcium chloride is not added for any purpose relating to cultures. There is no way for Thewitt to provide any references because no such references exist -- one way or the other.
It's no big deal.
Anyone coming here looking for peer-reviewed, academically supported answers to questions will soon leave in frustration.
I would consider this forum one of the best sources for peer-reviewed answers to any question, with the large number of skilled and experienced cheese makers here - both amateurs and professionals. If someone answers a question here with an incorrect, partially correct, or confusing answer, they are typically corrected - politely - with experience, opinion and facts.
There are a couple of highly technical publications on cheese-making that exist in the marketplace for anyone who wants to read the science of cheese making and take a heavily academic approach. I've throughly enjoyed reading "Technology of Cheesemaking," by Barry Law, and "Cheese Problems Solved," edited by McSweeney. Neither is a cheese making book per se, but both have great technical information in them that an academic might appreciate. Certainly anyone who plans to make cheese professionally will want to understand what's in these books as reference material.
From "Cheese Problems Solved," with regards to the addition of CaCl2:
"Increasing the Ca2+ concentration of milk through the addition of CaCl2 is used frequently to improve its renneting properties [33]. Addition of 1±2 mM CaCl2 reduces the gelation time and results in a stronger gel from both heated and unheated milk. Increasing the Ca2+ concentration of milk improves the second stage of rennet coagulation (gel assembly) through reducing the electrostatic repulsion between casein micelles which, in turn, promotes their aggregation into a gel [24]. Through its effect on the milk salts system, addition of Ca2+ also causes a slight decrease in the pH of milk which promotes rennet action [4, 30] and calcium concentrations up to 4 mg ml-1 reduce the denaturation of whey proteins."
These two books includes hundreds of reference documents, though I am sorry to say I have not read more than a dozen of them myself.
I guess the POSSIBLE issue could be that adding Ca Cl BEFORE you have added culture might somehow inhibit the culture from a) growing and b) inhibit the production of lactic acid OR adding Ca Cl after you have cultured the milk might mean the Ca Cl itself reacts with the lactic acid that has formed reducing the acidity. I don't know, but these pseudo hypotheses would seem to me to be a little more connected to the process than whether I have my hair cut on a specific day of the week - given that I am adding a compound to the milk which I presume is actively integrated into the milk itself.. and which I am working to change when I add the culture... But telling me my question is stupid is not the way to educate anyone's ignorance - and I say that as a teacher.
Hey remember , it's cheese ........
There are no stupid questions
Quote from: Gregore on June 06, 2018, 04:09:44 AM
Hey remember , it's cheese ........
There are no stupid questions
:D :D :D
I fully agree!
There are no stupid questions no matter the subject. :)
Bernardsmith, I apologise for embarrassing you with my awkward attempt at explaining the problem. Indeed, the question was an excellent one. It was rather the reaction to the answer which seemed to require extra explanation. As clumsy as it was, I hope it proved useful to you.
This gave me a headache :o