A recent study by Associate Professor Jian Zhao, from the School of Chemical Engineering at UNSW Sydney, managed to take this one step further and identified a seaweed species with sufficient caseinolytic activity – milk-clotting ability – to produce cheese. The cheese yield was also comparable to that obtained using traditional rennet.
“We tested seven different seaweed-derived proteases on their milk-clotting potential and found one was able to help make real fresh cheese in a lab environment,” Zhao said.
“But this is only a small fraction of the hundreds of different seaweed species in our oceans, so there is a lot more scope to find something out there that could be even more effective.”
But would the cheese be edible? More studies need to be conducted to be certain, but Dr Zhao says it’s likely safe to eat given seaweed coagulant is already widely used as a food gelling agent, and the seaweed is eaten in many diets.
“Safety-wise, we don’t think there are too many concerns, especially as we’re just using the protease as a coagulant. We did need to make an adjustment to the typical temperature used in the purification stage, as the seaweed coagulant is optimum at a higher temperature than the normal rennet, otherwise, the process remained the same.”
Zhao says the future of cheese production could be reliant on our oceans. The food microbiologist says the marine ecosystem is a vast untapped resource for obtaining food ingredients.
“Considering that over 70 per cent of the world’s surface is covered by oceans, it’s a tremendous untapped resource for food components, including the types of things we need to sustain cheese production as consumption continues to grow,” A/Prof. Zhao says.
Milk coagulation, or curdling, is an essential step in cheese production. For many kinds of cheese, this is done using a milk-clotting enzyme or ‘proteases’ called rennet, a substance derived from young calf’s stomachs that is in relatively…
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