Week 2 Lab Data [Group D]: Cheese-Making

Throughout my group’s cheese-making process, we recorded data concerning fire-temperature, whey temperature, yield and waste by volume, and the time at which all these data were procured.

Our process began with placing 3.61 kg (or one gallon) of whole milk into a cauldron. We created a fire, which at 13:30, the time at which we began recording data, was at a temperature of 725.2˚C. For the next hour and fifteen minutes, we would attempt to use this fire to keep our milk at a consistent temperature of 90˚F, which is about 32˚C. At 13:45, we added rennet dissolved in water to the milk, which began to alter the milk’s consistency. Below is a graph which summarizes the liquid within the cauldron’s temperature across the aforementioned timespan.

At 14:45, when the mixture had reached our desired consistency, we removed 244 g of cheese curd, and were left with 2.822 kg of whey. So, we had a curd to whey yield ratio of 0.24/2.822, or about 9%. Of the initial 3.61 kg of milk that we used, we produced a combined whey and curd yield of 3.066 kg, which is about 85% of the mass of our original input.

We next transitioned to boiling the whey, a crucial step in the production of mysost cheese. We fed the fire, and at 15:38, it was at a temperature of 884.7˚C. Beginning at around 15:30 and continuing for the next 45 minutes, we recorded the temperature of our whey in the cauldron. We also recorded a fire temperature again at 15:55 of 673˚C, reflecting our struggles with keeping the fire hot enough to bring our whey to a boil during this period. Throughout the 45 minutes, the fire continued to dwindle, resulting in our subsequent decision to abandon mysost in favor of ricotta. Below is a graph which shows the temperature of our whey, which did not reach the 100˚C threshold which we believed to be whey’s approximate boiling point.

We added the juice of one lemon to our whey at 16:00, in an attempt to make ricotta. We did not however, add any cream. Because of this, and the time constraint under which we were working, our ricotta yield was negligible, so we took no further measurements.