STUDIES ON ACCELERATION OF PENTELEU PASTA FILATA CHEESE RIPENING BY EXOGENES ENZYMES

Abstract

Cheese is the most valuable dairy product, enjoyed more or less by all the people in the world. Pasta Filata type cheeses make up the world’s second largest manufacturated cheese segment after Cheddar type cheeses. Ripening is a slow and consequently an expensive process that is not fully predictable or controllable. The ripening process of most hard cheeses is a long lasting process, thus expensive, since the financial expenses for the raw material purchase, processing, and treatments during ripening are refunded after a relatively long time. This fact is reason of the interest in the methods for acceleration of cheeseripening, yet maintaining comparable organoleptic and physico-chemical properties of the final product.The selective methods of accelerating ripening cheese by addition of enzymes are in the center of these tests. The objectives of this study were to investigate the effects of adding exogenes enzymes on the ripening period of the pasta filata cheese – type Penteleu - by evaluating proteolitic process of samples obtained by adding different enzymes, in comparison with a sample that was not added exogenes enzymes.