Anything dairy-related

Monthly Archives: August 2006

Where did that yoghurt taste come from?

Hi, Yoghurt Fans

When you have a funny taste in your yoghurt it is not always funny 😉

If the factory manufactures an unflavoured yoghurt and then add flavours, the first question should be if the taste is present in the unflavoured yoghurt as well.  If it is, then it cannot have come from the flavour or fruit that was added, right?

So now it must come from anything that is added before that point, like the milk itself, the stabilisers, the sugar/sweeteners or base.   Get to every ingredient, and make sure it is from the same batch.   For example, get milk from the same farmer on the same day, etc.

Some of the yoghurt can be used to innoculate autoclaved/UHT/longlife milk and if the same taste is perceived after the milk is set, then the taste is microbial, right?   I say this because if the 3% or so yoghurt with the funny taste was mixed into milk and no taste was evident and after incubation the taste is there, then it must be microbial, I think.

Hope you found this of value.

Kind regards,

Leon the Milkman

Milkman mixes

Hi, Folks

I mixed some calibration standards for dairy composition testing yesterday.  We made up a set of ten samples with butterfat ranging from skimmed to 5%.

The whole process starts off with me collecting different milks from nearby farms – by different I mean milk that comes from different races of cows that feed on different feeds.

Once the milk is mixed to give it a range of fat it is tested by internationally accepted methods and distributed to factories to calibrate their testing equipment.

Kind regards,

Leon the Milkman

Mozzarella not stretching?

Hi, Cheese lovers

If you have the above problem I would recommend that you taste the milk first to see if you can detect something that way.  If the milk is not very sweet – chances are that water was added.   After doing a freezing point to eliminate that possibility, I would do solids, meaning fat and protein in this case. 

I would also do a phosphatase test to see if the milk was not pasteurized previously, because that would denature the protein so that it will not stretch on a second heating.   You might have pasteurized at too high a temperature yourself as well.

The milk could have a high SCC(somatic cell count) which is an indication of mastitis and this would lower the casein protein in the milk, which would lead to lower yields of cheese and slower, weaker setting of the curd.

Kind regards,

Leon the Milkman

Louwrens Smit visits Elsenburg!

Hi, Dairy Friends

Louwrens Smit from our head office gave us a surprise visit this week and helped us to get the Elsenburg Dairy Lab. closer to our ISO 17025 accreditation goal.

Louwrens you are a great guy and thanks for your help!

Kind regards,

Leon the Milkman

Froth on your coffee?

Hi, Milk Fans

There is a new article posted on the homepage at http://www.dairy-info.org/ about the factors that prevent milk from frothing.   This will be of interest to coffee shop owners as well as the guys supplying them.

Kind regards,

Leon the Milkman

Coffee for Entertaining

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I'm Leon the Milkman,  dairy specialist and  professional cheese experimenter.

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