Evaluation of Yield and Quality of Cheddar Cheese Manufactured from Milk with Added Whey Protein Concentrate

Large quantities of whey are produced as a by-product from the manufacture of cheese or casein. The United States has an annual cheese production of about 2.2 billion kg. The cheese industry has also experienced a steady increase in cheese production of about 6% a year (44). In the process, nearly 18.1 billion kg of whey are produced. Whey was once a discarded product of little value to the cheese producers. With the advent of laws and regulations governing the disposal of whey, whey became a problem that had few solutions. Even today, with the high cost of disposal and the need to reduce environmental pollution, only about 60% of the whey produced in the United States is processed (72). Concentrating and drying whey eliminates water for easier handling of the product, and increases keeping quality. By far, the single largest use of whey solids is in the form of dry whey. Dry whey powders are used as commodity ingredients mostly in human food applications (65). Use of whey proteins has been limited because of poor physical and functional properties of the commercial products. Within the last 10 years, the efficient and economical removal of the water from whey by membrane filtration has become accepted in the dairy industry. Research results have indicated some advantages for the use of ultrafiltration (UF) for removal of some of the milk serum before cheese manufacture. These include increased productivity and improved cheese yields. The largest use of membrane techniques in the dairy industry is to fractionate whey. Most research indicates that whey protein concentrates (WPC) produced by UF have superior functional properties over conventional heat coagulated wheys. The present commercial market for WPC is small, but considerable evidence indicates that more product formulation work is needed to move WPC into the general marketplace. The purpose of this research was to determine if reconstituted WPC could be used as an additive to milk for cheese making to increase yields