Cheesy Lab Analysis!

In this lab, we asked the question, “What are the optimal conditions and curdling agents for making cheese?”. My team mates and I figured out that chymosin is the best curdling agent when acid or heat is added to the milk solution. This collected information came from the Cheese Lab my class recently proceeded. Also, the scientific study from the lab came from the textbook as well as the video podcasts I had for homework. This data supports our claim because chymosin lowers the activation energy making the curdling process faster. Curdling milk without an enzyme makes the reacting process slower, but when the an enzyme is added, the activation energy lowers and the reacting process is faster. This concludes the data that supports our claim.

While our hypothesis was supported by our data which was, “If the best curdling agent is chymosin, then it would process the milk faster with a lower pH and at room temperature.”. There could have been errors due the class’s hot water bath not being at the right temperature which lead to the fact that the room temperature was warmer. These errors affected our results because it made the time to curdle the milk slower than it was actually supposed to be. Due to these errors, in future experiments I recommend to check if everything is true for the experiment and I also recommend to always test if the water baths are warm or cold.

This lab was done to demonstrate to show that different curdling agents slow down activation energy and speed up curdling process of making cheese out of milk. From this lab I learned that there are different substrates to use for different results which helps me understand the concept of enzymes and what they are used for. Based on my experience from this lab, I learned the different ways of making cheese with different curdling agents with optimal conditions.