| Summary: | Worldwide consumption of cheese has increased over the years. The average Swede consumes somewhere around 20 kilograms of cheese per year, which is an increase of a 100 % over the past 50 years. One of the most popular kinds of cheese during the past decades is mozzarella, due to its’ use as pizza cheese. Flavor and consistency differ between the traditional kind, made out of buffalo’s milk, and the industrially made kind, made out of cow’s milk. Both the techniques as well as the kinds of milk used have a huge impact on the final product. The authors had access to fresh ewe’s (sheep’s) milk from a local farmer. Could it be used to produce a new type of mozzarella? The main purpose of this paper was to develop a technique to produce fresh hand-made mozzarella made out of ewe’s milk using starter bacteria. The second purpose was to perform a sensory evaluation of the produced cheese in order to compare cheese made out of ewe’s milk with cheese made out of cow’s milk. In a series of experiments we examined how cheese production was affected by rennet, starter cultures, temperatures and pH-levels. The sensory evaluation was performed using a group of respondents who were asked to perform a simple ranking test where one sample was mozzarella made out of ewe’s milk, one sample was mozzarella made out of cow’s milk and one sample was store-bought mozzarella made out of cow’s milk. Ewe’s milk turned out to be unsuitable for production of mozzarella using the procedure we developed. The proteins in ewe’s milk behaved differently from the proteins in cow’s milk when the cheese curd was stretched in hot water, resulting in a less stringy and more porous texture. The most suitable bacterial starter was a combination of Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus, both of which you find in yoghurt. Results from the sensory evaluation showed that the respondents preferred the fresh mozzarella made out of cow’s milk. The method that we developed did not produce the desired texture in mozzarella made out of ewe’s milk. However, it is well adjusted for the production of mozzarella made out of cow’s milk. Keywords: Cheese production, Ewe‘s milk, Lactobacillus bulgaricus, Rennet, Streptococcus thermophilus
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