French cheesed off as 'revolutionary' lab technique ripens fromage in days

France's top food body has unveiled a “revolutionary” laboratory process to create a range of cheeses that look and smell like the real thing in "days rather than months". But purists warn the move could spell “the death of true cheese”. Researchers at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, INRA, say they have cracked a way of massively accelerating the ripening process normally so essential to creating a cheese with the required texture and smelliness. What nature takes three weeks, three months or three years to do we can do in two to three days using a process that is far faster and less costly,” INRA cheese expert Romain Jeantet told the Telegraph.Brie and Camembert take roughly a month to ripen, while a mature Comté can take up to three years. The secret to the process, which researchers have coined From'Innov, is to split the production of the cheese and its aroma in the laboratory and mix them later to create the desired product “à la carte”.“With the same material, we can thus make a cream cheese on Monday, a Camembert on Tuesday and a hard cheese on Wednesday,” said colleague Gilles Garric, who said INRA was in talks with three dairy giants over the technique. The result was very similar to traditionally-made cheese, the researchers insisted.“We can recreate a cheese that has roughly the same texture as Camembert, then we can isolate bacteria that create the typical Camembert taste. We mix the two together. In the end it will have the same shape, the same taste and same texture as Camembert” – if a little more “homogenous”, he said.To make the end product more nutritious, experts can mix in probiotics – live bacteria and yeasts.He added: “If you want to put such cheese in salads or sandwiches you will find something that tastes exactly the same but costs far less and is far faster to make.” But purists are appalled at what they see as the latest attempt to kill of a great French exception – smelly cheese lovingly made with raw milk and on a human scale.“This isn’t cheese at all, it’s totally synthetic,” sniffed Véronique Richez-Lerouge, who runs the traditional cheese defence group Association Fromages de Terroirs and recently wrote a book called La Vache Qui Pleure (Crying Cow).“Industrial dairy groups have long dreamed of making cheese with as little milk as possible in as little time as possible so it costs as little as possible, with a consensual taste to appeal to the masses. INRA has made their dream come true,” she said. “Next they’ll be adding banana or raspberry aroma.” She added: “This is yet another step towards creating dead food rather than letting nature run its course. Cheese is alive and needs to be ripened and matured over a long period, preferably with live raw milk. You cannot create this natural complexity in the laboratory. "Humans are made to eat live food with diverse bacteria, not dead food, which causes all sorts of problems such as allergies.” French chef Arnaud Daguin said: “As a cook for 40 years and someone who is carefully about food quality there is one thing that we cannot do without: transcendence. There is no point trying to play God and outdo the natural world when we haven’t even understood a tenth of its potential.” Mr Jeantet hit back that he was a “cheese lover” with no desire to “kill off traditional cheese” but said that times had changed.“Traditional cheese has its place as a dish in its own right, generally at the end of a meal. But that use has dropped from 70 per cent in the 1970s to 50 per cent today,” he said.The rest, he said, was used for cooking, and there was a huge market for cheaper, multi-purpose cheese to rival the wildly successful mozzarella.The new technique was the best way to offer cheese tailor-made to “local tastes and requirements” in countries like China, where demand for dairy products is exploding.It also travelled well, as the cheese can be sent in powder form and the aroma separately, and mixed in situ.He insisted that the entire cheese-making process used only the normal, natural ingredients found in regular cheese.The technique will be on display at the world Cheese Symposium, which will take place in Rennes starting on Sunday.INRA will also show off a special anti-mould bacteria for fresh cream and an experimental Emmental with anti-inflammatory properties

Drying research From physical and biological mechanisms to breakthrough innovation

Drying research From physical and biological mechanisms to breakthrough innovation. STLOpenday

Exploiting one-dimensional exciton-phonon coupling for tunable and efficient single-photon generation with a carbon nanotube

Condensed-matter emitters offer enriched cavity quantum electrodynamical effects due to the coupling to external degrees of freedom. In the case of carbon nanotubes a very peculiar coupling between localized excitons and the one-dimensional acoustic phonon modes can be achieved, which gives rise to pronounced phonon wings in the luminescence spectrum. By coupling an individual nanotube to a tunable optical micro-cavity, we show that this peculiar exciton-phonon coupling is a valuable resource to enlarge the tuning range of the single-photon source while keeping an excellent exciton-photon coupling efficiency and spectral purity. Using the unique flexibility of our scanning fiber cavity, we are able to measure the efficiency spectrum of the very same nanotube in the Purcell regime for several mode volumes. Whereas this efficiency spectrum looks very much like the free-space luminescence spectrum when the Purcell factor is small (large mode volume), we show that the deformation of this spectrum at lower mode volumes can be traced back to the strength of the exciton-photon coupling. It shows an enhanced efficiency on the red wing that arises from the asymmetry of the incoherent energy exchange processes between the exciton and the cavity. This allows us to obtain a tuning range up to several hundred times the spectral width of the source

Les produits laitiers et ingrédients secs, d’une stratégie de report à un marché à forte valeur ajoutée:le point de vue de la Recherche

Les produits laitiers et ingrédients secs, d’une stratégie de report à un marché à forte valeur ajoutée:le point de vue de la Recherche. Assemblée générale de l'union laitière de la Meus

Particle formation during dairy powders production is ruled by protein mechanical properties

Particle formation during dairy powders production is ruled by protein mechanical properties. Drying Days Conferenc

How to reduce the energy costs of food and dairy products to spray drying?

The most frequently used technique for dehydration of dairy products is spray drying. This is an effective method to preserve biological products as it does not involve prolong exposure of materials to severe heat treatment. Due to the variety and complexity of the concentrates to be dried, a more rigorous understanding of spray-drying based on physico-chemical and thermodynamic properties is necessary. At the same time, the current state of the art did not allow easy determination of the parameters of spray-drying of dairy products prior to drying, except from performing several complex and expensive experiments with pilot-scale spray-dryer. Nevertheless, recent advances in the understanding of product behavior toward water transfer with the development of a desorption method makes it possible to give several answers to the following question: What is the best strategy to anticipate the behavior of concentrate toward drying and to improve the process, the economy and the quality of the dairy powders? The strategical approach can be developed on the knowledge of the thermodynamic parameters of the spray dryer coupled to physico-chemical characteristics of the concentrate. The software SD2P® (Spray Drying Parameters Simulation & Determination) developed by Schuck et al. (2009) is a way, among others, to predict the value of these parameters when they are not known. The combined results provide more precise determination of spray-drying parameters (including inlet/outlet air temperature, mass/powder flow rate, powder temperature, etc.), powder state during spray-drying (stickiness) and the cost of spray-drying with respect to weather conditions. Several cases will be presented to show the interest of this strategy in order to anticipate the spray-drying parameters and the powder behavior. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

From’Innov: a new concept for building cheese texture and taste separately for design-on-demand and short supply

Combined steps, such as draining and acidification, as well as ripening downtime still represent bottlenecks during cheese making. Indeed, they negatively affect the control of process efficiency, the cheese weight range, the quality of by-products and the balance between supply and demand. In this work, an innovative process was proposed and validated on a semi-industrial scale in order to manufacture cheese products without ripening, albeit on a large range of texture and taste mimicking fresh to pressed type cheeses. On the one hand, draining and acidification steps were uncoupled by using membrane filtration and centrifugation to fractionate milk constituents, and then by reconstructing a controlled texture matrix with regard to protein / fat ratio, denaturation rate of whey proteins, mineralization and amount of available lactose.Different aromatic matrices were produced in parallel by growing Yarrovia lipolytica, Propionibacterium freudenreichii, a mixture of Lactococcus lactis / cremoris / diacetylactis, or Hafnia alvéi in controlled environmental conditions. In less than four days, aromatic sulfur, ketone, acidic and aldehyde molecules were produced at concentration similar to that of a ripened curd. Finally, the texture and aromatic matrices were assembled in a ratio 90:10, and then textured through pH and temperature adjustment, NaCl, rennet or texturing agent addition. Results showed it was possible to obtain products with firmness varying from that of a spread cheese to that of a semi hard type cheese, and with aroma mimicking Saint Paulin as well as Cheddar depending on the quantities and proportions of added aromatic molecules.This eco-efficient and patented process makes it possible to control each step independently, to reduce significantly the inputs, to obtain standardized by-products and consequently to limit production costs. It is possible with the same equipment to produce from day to day and on demand any types of flavored and textured cheeses