Press a pack of butter
Take home message What a cow wants? A cow is a mammal and a ruminant. This makes her special, along with other ruminants. Like us, the cow has a digestive system with a stomach and intestines, however she is also …
All posts filed under: Milk
Very high yielding cows?
Take home message From a cow on pasture to an indoor animal What an animal will produce, depends on both nature and nurture, the interplay between genetics and environment. Cows have looked very different over the course of domestication. Roman …
Centenarians among cows
The so-called ‘Blue Zones’ around the world (including Okinawa (Jp), Sicily (It), Costa Rica (Central America) are home to above-average numbers of older people. They are called Centenarians (over 100-year-olds). This is an intriguing phenomenon with the question, ‘what is …
Butter, technical or natural spread?
Take home message Realising spreadable butter kept at low ambient temperature Butter competes with margarine and ‘spreads’ when it comes to spreadability. Butter is a natural product with different fatty acid composition in summer or winter. Margarine is made up …
The genome of kefir
Take home message Kefir grains (= kefir plant = SCOBY) can be found all over the world, but are there any differences? The dairy industry has discovered kefir in the past 10 years and you can buy kefir everywhere in …
Traditional cheesemaking
Take home message No stainless steel Today, everything around milk and milk processing is stainless steel (INOX). The cheese vat in which the milk is processed is stainless steel, the milk pipelines through which the milk is pumped and even …
What do you call kefir?
Take home message Kefir from SCOBY versus kefir made of a commercial starter? German colleagues (Nejafati et al., 2022) looked at not only the microbial composition of kefir, but also the metabolic products of the bacteria and yeasts present in …
Symbiocene kefir
Take home message Symbiocene thinking Through the Dutch TV-programme ‘Tegenlicht’, it became clear, that a new way of thinking, a philosophy, is needed to leave the Anthropocene era behind us. We are living in the Anthropocene, the human-dominated technological age. Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albre sought new concepts to express our feelings associated with experiencing nature. Unfortunately, many of these feelings stem from human destruction of nature and the environment, urbanisation and artificial ways of …
Bulgarian-, Turkish- or Greek yoghurt?
Take home message One big family? Fermented dairy products vary from region to region, if only in name. Yoghurt is part of this family of fermented products. Lactic acid is produced by the conversion of milk sugar. Sometimes acetic acid …
Lactose in milkproducts
Lactose intolerance Lactose is milk sugar, found in a concentration of 4-5% in cow milk. People with lactose intolerance cannot digest lactose in the small intestine, so too much undigested lactose ends up in the large intestine. Here, lactose causes …
