Cheese Making Lab

The purpose of the cheese making lab was to determine which curdling agent, when added to milk, produced the most amount of curds, as well as the curdling agent that produced curds the fastest. It was expected that buttermilk would produce the most amount of curds and Chymosin would produce curds the fastest. In reality, both buttermilk and Chymosin produce the most amount of curds, and Chymosin produced curds the fastest, which is in line with the hypothesis. Both buttermilk and Chymosin produced an average of 4.7 milliliters of curds, followed by rennin, which formed 4.5 milliliters of curds, and finally milk, which produced 3.3 milliliters of curds. Chymosin produced curds the fastest, with curds forming after 21.7 minutes, followed by rennin, which took an average of 29.3 minutes to curdle, then by buttermilk, which took 650 minutes to curdle. Plain milk took the longest to form curds, curdling after 2386.7 minutes. Milk is made into cheese when bacteria is added, which use lactose to make lactic acid. The lactic acid then causes casein, a protein in the milk, to break down and fall out of solution and clump together, forming curds. It makes sense that Chymosin formed
Not only is Chymosin specifically bioengineered for the cheese making process, it is cheaper than extracting natural rennet from cows, and produces the most curds in the shortest amount of time. To follow up on this experiment, one could experiment with adding different volumes of Chymosin to milk to determine what the ideal amount of chymosin is to create the most cheese curds the fastest. If a company is looking for quantity over speed, another experiment could be conducted to determine whether increased volumes of buttermilk will create more curds than an increased volume of Chymosin, since the two curdling agents produced the same amount of curds in a small scale