Talk:Whey cheese

Questions to be answered

It's difficult to find good sources to write this article. I'd like the article to answer the following questions:

• Is acid of sweet whey used for whey cheese production, or both?
• Ricotta doesn't melt, see this and this source. Does this apply to every whey cheese? If so, why doesn't it melt? Provide good sources.
• Ricotta can be eaten by persons with casein intolerance according to it's article (which lacks a source for the claim). Do all whey cheeses contain no or very low amounts of casein? Find a good source for this.
• Possibly explain yield further and establish if yield is indeed lower compared to production of ordinary cheese. Pintado et al. claim a yield of 6% (in a different situation of course), much lower than the source referenced currently in the article.
• Can something be said about the moisture content of whey cheese and it's effect on shelf life in general? Especially in fresh soft varieties it should be quite high? Find a good source for this.
• Can something be said about the fat content of whey cheese in general? Find a good source for this.
• Clarify difference between lactalbumin and albumin since both are mentioned in the article and I don't understand it.

Any help would be appreciated. --AlexanderVanLoon (talk) 16:49, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your work on this article.

I am not convinced that the Codex Alimentarius (which does not classify whey cheese as a kind of cheese) is the only good taxonomy of cheese. In particular, the well-regarded Ottogalli classification (update) categorizes whey cheese as a "fresh soft cheese", subcategory A3/A4 "Acid addition plus heat shock of whey".

The current article claims that whey cheese is not cheese, with this footnote. But Fox is referring specifically to the brunost family, which is made by a very different process (not involving coagulation) from ricotta, and from different components of the whey; see also this book. --Macrakis (talk) 17:35, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Re your questions: lactalbumin is simply the albumin found in milk. The casein content of whey cheese will be low since the casein coagulates in the first cheese-making. How low does that have to be to be suitable for casein intolerant people? Don't know. As for yield, I think it depends what exactly you're putting in the numerator and the denominator: do you mean dry (weight of water excluded) output compared to liquid input? That is much smaller for whey cheeses; the existing sources should have that info. For fat content, see the info I added to the whey butter section -- if you get 3lbs butter (at about 75% fat) / 1000 lbs whey, you can calculate the fat content of the cheese given the cheese yield. For discussion of cheese melting, see Cheese#Eating and cooking, which references McGee.

The answers to some of them depend on the particular cheese: some cheese are made with sweet whey, some with soured. Moisture content varies widely.

In reviewing the literature, it seems pretty clear that "real" whey cheese like ricotta and anthotyro are a very different thing from the Scandinavian brown cheeses, which don't coagulate at all as part of the production process. I wonder if we should devote this article to real whey cheese, and refer to the brunost article for the brown "cheeses". --Macrakis (talk) 14:38, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

You forgot Paneer!

Hello, I am Norwegian and was just takling to an indian as I was of the mistanken belief that only our brown cheese, the Indian Paneer, and the Italias Ricotta, or was it Mozarella being the most famous examples. But then I discovered first of all I was wrong, there’s plenty of whey cheeses, but secondly, you don’t have Paneer in your list. See this link. Thank you.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4008736/ 149.7.163.213 (talk) 08:41, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

@149.7.163.213 The paneer article and this review both suggest that paneer is made primarily from the curds, although some whey proteins may be included in the curds. The whey is generally discarded. It is my understanding that ricotta is made from the whey, after the curds have been used for another cheese. Or am I misunderstanding the definition of whey cheese and ricotta? -kslays (talk • contribs) 10:12, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

I've added it, thanks!