The Secret Ingredient: Whey
My friend Arkadiy studied organic chemistry, as you’ll see for yourself pretty soon. His approach to cooking is different from mine in a lot of ways (more technical and more patient), but I’ve learned so much from him over the years, as well as gotten the opportunity to taste or cook with the results of his fermentation experiments. (The mushroom meringue I wrote about here would not have been the same without his mushroom garum.)
I said that I was going to edit down some of the descriptions of the cheesemaking process, but Ark pointed out that knowing the right technical terms can help a lot if you’re Googling to learn more. I’m probably not going to make cheese myself, but I found it fascinating to hear about what’s going on during the process. I also want to try some of these whey-braised potatoes he describes — maybe as part of a poutine with homemade cheese curds and mushroom gravy?
So my secret ingredient is whey, like milk whey, which has a relatively technical definition but is also just the general leftovers after the casein proteins have curdled in cheesemaking or yogurt-making or anything like that.
I got into it when I started making cheese during the pandemic. Like many others, I developed a variety of home/kitchen hobbies, often involving doing things patiently. Beer-brewing, miso-making, soy sauce, stuff like that. Mostly vegan things. But I am not vegan and I really love cheese, especially a smear-ripened washed-rind stinky kind of thing that’s either hard to get in the US if it’s from unpasteurized milk or astronomically expensive. So I decided to try that out and [whey] was the natural byproduct that was left after you strained out the thing that was cheese.
Kate: Can you walk me through the process of making cheese?
So for the majority of cheeses, the process is that you take the milk and bring it up to something close to the body temperature of a cow and you add a culture. Culture is typically composed of some kind of lactobacillus and maybe some other bacteria or even yeasts, but essentially: something that will consume the lactose and bring the pH down. You keep that warm for an hour and then you add in enzymatic rennet of some kind. Either rennet from the stomach of a young ruminant (which is there so that they can, you know, eat the milk as a baby) or in my case thistle rennet. There’s just a number of enzymes from plant or fungal and bacterial sources that happen to work pretty well. They basically disrupt the stable conformation of the casein proteins. Casein proteins are pretty well defined. There's like four of them and they're the ones that complex with lipids to form the little globules of the emulsion that is milk.
So you add the enzyme, the enzyme breaks up that nice emulsion, it causes the proteins to get a little bent out of shape and clump together. And then you heat that for awhile steadily, maybe a little stirring, but basically let the loose ends of the amino acids crosslink, and form the solid that is going to become our cheese. Take that out of the remaining stuff, which is what we're talking about. Drain it, press and age it or however you do, but you're left with this liquid that has all the other stuff from the milk. So that's albumins, globulins, immunoglobulins, a bunch of the lactose and so on. If you used a very active culture and let it go for a long time, that will have consumed a lot of the lactose and dropped the pH quite a bit, and will result in a sour whey — that’s done with a lactic cheese, like queso blanco. If you used a slow acting, maybe mesophilic culture or didn't use a culture at all, that will result in sweet whey because it has a more neutral pH and more lactose.
K: So the amount of lactose correlates with the sweetness level?
Yeah, it's pretty direct: the more lactose versus lactic acid, the sweeter it is. The first few times I made cheese I literally just poured the whey down the drain, which you really should not do, certainly if you're doing industrial scale since that’s the sort of thing that leads to algal blooms. So my first instinct was just, Okay, what can I do with this, this feels wrong. The volume you have left after you’ve fished out the casein is magically basically the same, because it was kind of hiding between the water molecules, it wasn't really taking up a lot of displacement volume. So you have a lot of this stuff and it smells pretty good. It's obviously interesting. If you're into fermenting stuff, then, you know, Hey, there's lactic acid so there’s probably something cool going on. I’ve done a lot of lacto-fermentation of everything from cabbage to pineapple to whatever has sugars in it. So that was the impetus. And the reading I’d done at that point also pointed toward a bunch of interesting stuff. Whey protein is typically what's used in milk derived supplements, like bodybuilder-type supplements.
K: Yeah, I’ve tried those powders when I was into weightlifting.
So clearly there is a use there. There’s a lot of interesting proteins like the immunoglobulins. It’s very high in leucine. Only about 20% of the protein in cow's milk ends up in the whey but it has a relatively high — I actually don't know the correct medical term for this — but it's fairly good for sourcing the amino acids that you need for muscle development. The thing about the powder you were taking was it’s probably not quite the same as the whey from making cheese. It's probably been separated, they've tried to separate as much of this crude protein as they could and left behind the residual fats, the lactose, other bioactives. So you're not really getting whatever benefit there might be from those things.
K: So tell me about what you do with the whey.
So, you can totally drink it. It’s similar to certain Central Asian drinks in the flavor profile, kind of a tangy refreshing taste. I mean, if you’re not grossed out by the idea of milk to begin with, it’s not particularly weird beyond that. One fun thing you could do is carbonate it and make a waste soda, because the acidity works nicely there. I just add CO2, because I don’t really like sweet things, but something like pomegranate molasses would be nice.
But the most basic thing you can do, which is very traditional, is to make ricotta, which is recooked whey. It would basically be a secondary income source for alpine dairies where they're making a cheese that takes, you know, six months or possibly years to age to a market-ready state. And you’ve got to pay your bills today. While the whey is still fresh, you heat it up close to boiling which causes the remaining proteins to start denaturing and gelling. Kind of similar to how the caseins did previously. And the most traditional way is just heat application — heat and time. The frustrating thing is that this traditional method comes from a place where you have a 30-gallon container of whey, but you’re only gonna get a few ounces from a two gallon batch. You end up with something basically sufficient for breakfast the following day.
So I don’t know if there’s a term for the first whey or the second whey, basically before you took the ricotta out of it or not. But even the second whey will have some residual enzymes and lactose and things like that in it. The simplest thing is to add it to a broth or soup base. That’s really nice, it adds a little tang. The other thing I like is using it as a marinade/braising liquid. Similar to any kind of acidic marinade, it’ll sort of condition the texture of whatever you’re putting into it, it’ll parcook it to an extent. The really classic thing to do is whey-braised potatoes. You cut small potatoes in half with the cut side facedown, cover with whey up to the top, braise at a low-medium heat until it’s absorbed, and that’ll actually penetrate into the carbohydrate matrix of the potato and bring the flavor in. And once that step is done you turn up the heat, maybe add a little fat and shallow fry it, and that will result in partial breakdown of the starches and also caramelization of the lactose, so you end up with these really beautiful very nicely browned, maillardized, caramelized potato wedges, with a little bit of a milky taste but kind of subtle. And if you used the first whey, you’ll also end up with sort of a cheesy coating in this process. That can be nice though a little messy. If you use the final whey then it'll be a cleaner result.
K: So I want to zoom out. I think it would be clear to someone hearing this that you have a chemistry background. I'm interested in whether you’ve always taken your interest in chemistry into the kitchen or whether there was an intervening period when you were just working on computers, and then you found a way to start applying these things that you used to study.
I don’t think there’s a discontinuity per se. I didn’t really cook much until college and I started cooking in a way that sort of paralleled my lab work. And I found it very calming, you know? It’s that weird thing where you come home from your job and you're doing basically the same thing you were doing at work, but it's calming now because of the context.
I never really knew what I was doing, but I was using the same sort of mindset to learn about food chemistry as I was learning about organic lab chemistry. Note-taking, learning about the theory that underlies the practice, reading actual papers to some extent. Then over the years, I got more and more serious about my cooking, but obviously have not been practicing the academic chemistry stuff. So it kind of subsumed whatever energy would have gone in that direction, I guess.
K: How much energy does go into your kitchen experiments? Because it seems like a lot.
Well, it’s one of those things. It doesn’t feel like any because it’s so rejuvenative.
I think the most valuable thing I've taken away is not necessarily the ability to read and understand some complicated paper, but to really break down the reactions or processes within cooking and fermentation and isolate them and make them — honestly — lazier and easier and also more repeatable. Like the vacuum bag lacto-fermentation, I didn’t create or even innovate anything in that department, but having that as a tool available is fantastic. One of my formative food memories is filling a giant barrel of cabbage for Eastern European sauerkraut. That was so much work and even though it had been done year after year it was a little unpredictable and messy. And now whenever I think of a vegetable that would be good lacto-fermented, it’s a chop and a seal away and I come back in a week, and it’s so low-effort, so automatic. It’s not like a tradition I had to learn from a young age and perfect. You can sort of figure out how to build that relationship to the practice yourself. So I like that.
K: If someone wants to get started making cheese themselves, what would you recommend?
Making something like a paneer is a really easy way to see the magic happen. And then the next step would be some kind of homestead cheese — I hate all the pioneer/pastoral imagery around that stuff, but basically there's a range of what we call farmstead cheeses that are relatively forgiving and relatively practical. Just look for a simple farmstead cheese recipe — and don't go to sites like Pioneer Woman, just go to cheesemaking.com. It’s like the place for all cheesemaking information on the internet, it’s crazy centralized, one guy writes up all the recipes. I like the site, I just don't love that it's all in one place like this.
K: Do you think you want to scale up your cheesemaking operation?
Honestly, not so much on the dairy side. I’m a very long term vegetarian and I don’t drink milk, so there’s always a little bit of weirdness dealing with this liquid, and I think the greater quantities do become a bit more body horror. And it’s also just — it’s hot, it’s scalding, there's constant weeping and dripping and scaling does not make that stuff easier and at some point, you can't even lift containers. I've gone through three mini fridges — okay, now I'm on the third one — that I’ve been using as a cheese cave. And they don’t really like that very much, the humidity level that’s involved. So I think I'm happy with my, like, three gallon scale.
What I’m Cooking
The Caramelized Cabbage I'm Making All Winter (v, gf)
This is the caramelized red cabbage I’ve been making seemingly every week since it got cold. You can put in basically whatever you have in your pantry, & it takes very little work/attention, just time. It’s a little sweet, a little acidic, but still sort’ve deep and savory and would be a great Thanksgiving side for all the rich stuff.
Super simple recipe (for paid subscribers!) in my Friday newsletter:
