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

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

Aromatisé, impérissable, curatif : le fromage de demain se prépare en laboratoire

A Rennes, des chercheurs mettent au point de nouveaux procédés de production de fromage, plus rapides et moins coûteux, bien loin du standard traditionnel. Non, ce n’est pas une adaptation du film "L’aile ou la cuisse" mais bien la réalité. Du fromage fabriqué par assemblage de textures et de saveurs, moins cher à produire, affiné en quelques jours et aromatisé en fonction des demandes : le fromage de demain, s’invente déjà dans un laboratoire de l’Inra. Au risque de faire hurler les amoureux de la tradition. Un fromage affiné "en trois ou quatre jours" "Le fromage classique réclame un temps long alors qu’on peut obtenir un fromage en trois ou quatre jours avec un procédé beaucoup plus simple et de façon moins coûteuse", explique Gilles Garric, ingénieur de recherche à l’INRA (Institut national de la recherche agronomique) à Rennes dans l’unité "Science et technologie du lait et de l’œuf" (UMR-STLO). De nombreuses innovations autour du fromage seront présentées lors de la 10e édition du "Cheese symposium", qui se tient à Rennes – et pour la première fois en France – du 4 au 6 avril, avec la participation de 31 pays. Y compris ce nouveau procédé breveté, From’Innov, qui permet à la fois de réduire le temps d’affinage et de créer une base de "textures et de flaveurs", facilitant "l’élaboration de nouveaux fromages pour conquérir de nouveaux marchés, en France comme à l’international". Une pâte déclinable à l’infini Grâce à ce procédé, on peut obtenir des textures allant de la pâte à tartiner à celle d’un fromage à pâte pressée. On peut ensuite "les aromatiser selon les besoins et les adapter à des marchés différents", explique-t-on à l’INRA. "Un assemblage à la carte", relève Gilles Garric. "Avec le même matériel, on peut ainsi fabriquer une pâte fraîche le lundi, un camembert le mardi, une pâte pressée le mercredi, etc… (…) On peut faire des produits assez similaires" à nos fromages actuels, assure-t-il, précisant que l’INRA est "en pourparlers avec trois industriels" sur ce projet. Par exemple, "le produit aura l’arôme du camembert" après y avoir introduit "des molécules de camembert produites par des microorganismes". Le résultat donne "des produits qui se conservent très longtemps, qui sont très stables dans le temps", en partant d’une "matrice initiale, un pré-fromage liquide, adapté aux attentes du consommateur" en matière de calcium ou autre. Pour renforcer l’équilibre nutritionnel, des levains pré et probiotiques peuvent également être incorporés. "Les arômes sont produits sur des bases normales, ce ne sont pas des OGM. On fait du fromage avec des micro-organismes vivants que l’on met dans les meilleures conditions pour les faire produire vite", résume Gilles Garric. Des fromages "fonctionnalisés" Depuis la fin des quotas laitiers en avril 2015, la production laitière européenne augmente de 1,4 % par an, rappelle l’Inra. La production française, elle, a légèrement fléchi, durement frappée par une nouvelle crise du lait mais le pays reste le deuxième producteur européen derrière l’Allemagne. Si les marchés nationaux sont saturés, la demande mondiale de produits laitiers ne cesse d’augmenter, en particulier dans les pays émergents, analyse l’Inra. D’où la nécessité pour l’Europe, si elle veut accéder à ces nouveaux marchés, de développer "des fromages fonctionnalisés aux goûts adaptés aux demandes locales", parallèlement à une réduction des coûts de la transformation du lait pour accroître la "compétitivité sur ces marchés du grand export". "Les usages du fromage ont considérablement évolué", y compris en France, où "le plateau de fromage de fin de repas ne représente plus que 50 % de la consommation", note Romain Jeantet. "La consommation de mozzarella, le fromage le plus produit au monde, a augmenté de 20 % en France" Pour le "Cheese symposium", les chercheurs rennais exposeront aussi leurs études sur le développement de bactéries aux propriétés antifongiques (qui ralentissent le développement de moisissures sur des crèmes fraîches ou certains fromages)… ou encore sur un emmental expérimental, prochainement testé sur l’homme après l’avoir été sur des souris, doté de propriétés anti-inflammatoires permettant de soulager les maladies de l’intestin. Mais, rappellent les chercheurs de l’Inra, tous les fromages classiques auront leur place à cette réunion, y compris les nombreux fromages français AOP

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

Understanding antral contraction in human stomach through comparison with soft elastic reactor

IntroductionHuman digestion, a major concern due to the rapid development of nutrition-related chronic diseases,rely apart from enzymatic reactions on homogenization of the gastric content by antral contractions.Although recent CFD studies made it possible to explore the influence of the rheologicalproperties of the gastric content on the efficiency of gastric mixing, this key step is yet far from beingfully understood.ObjectiveThis work aims at discussing the influences of contraction frequency and viscosity of the digestain human gastric mixing by comparison with the mixing efficiency of an innovative soft elastic reactor(SER), that induces mixing by vibration of its wall in a similar way as antral contraction waves(ACWs) promote stomach motility.MethodologyIn this view, the SER mixing curve, recently established by Delaplace et al. (2018) using a dimensionalanalysis approach, was considered in order to determine the flow regime under which thegastric mixing of foods (viscosity ranging from 10-3 to 1 Pa.s) was performedMain findingsIt was shown that depending on the viscosity of the SER/stomach content and the amplitude of penetration/ACWs, the number of strikes/contractions required to achieve homogenization was largelydifferent. Moreover, the operating points of SER and ACWs mixing were close, justifying the comparisonbetween both reactors.ConclusionBased on this, the level of mechanical solicitation provided by human peristalsis was shown to benot as high as expected, and the mixing performance of distal region, confined in laminar regime,was found limited and not only due to mechanical solicitations. Further efforts are needed to investigatethe role of other physiological processes such as gastric secretions and gastric emptying inmixing performance of intragastric fluid homogenized by the antral contraction

Comparing economic and environmental performance of three industrial cheesemaking processes through a predictive analysis

The From'Innov cheesemaking process was recently suggested to increase process control and flexibilitywhile reducing the use of energy and fresh water. It focuses on building cheese texture and aromaseparately, in a shorter time than any other cheese technology, by enriching a liquid precheese witharomatic matrices fermented by traditional ripening microorganisms. This study assesses the economicbenefits, and the use of energy and fresh water of the From'Innov process through predictive analysis. Asingleday production of industrial bloomy soft cheese (Camembert-type) was simulated in three distinctvirtual plants (100,000 kg of milk per day) using different technological approaches: the From'Innov, theMaubois-Mocquot-Vassal (MMV, another liquid pre-cheese process) or the traditional processes. With itshigher margin and its lower specific energy and fresh water consumption, the From'Innov processappeared to be the most efficient

Technological breakthrough and innovation in the production of whey powders, with 30-40% reduction in energy costs

There are two essential stages in the elimination of water for the production of whey and permeate powders: concentration by vacuum evaporation followed by spray drying. These two operations alone represent 25% of the energy consumed by the French dairy industry, the major part of which is due to the drying stage. Indeed, 96.7% of the whey water is removed during the vacuum evaporation/concentration stage, whereas drying, which removes only 3.3% of the water, requires 31% of the total energy used over the entire process. One possible way to reduce energy consumption would be for the product to enter the drying tower at a higher level of dryness. We therefore propose replacing the drying tower with rotating evaporators, i.e. equipment adapted to highly viscous products able to pass from a liquid state to a granular state by a continuous process. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract