Whey

Lactic acid bacteria are present in starter culture and convert lactose (milk sugar) into lactic acid. That lactic acid makes the cheese more acidic, lowering the pH so that the cheese curdles and keeps longer. Moreover, the lactic acid affects the taste of the cheese. That's why we have our own recipe, which gives our typical Henri Willig flavour.

Important ingredients
Nowadays, you can also get vegetarian rennet, also called microbial rennet. We only use microbial rennet for our cheeses so that our cheese is also suitable for vegetarians.
These ingredients make the milk thicken and after 30 to 45 minutes the milk is then as thick as pudding. We start cutting this thickened milk by passing slowly rotating knives through the whey. This takes about 30-45 minutes and then you can see that the liquid whey is separated from the solid curd. The curd (10%) will eventually become the cheese. So the remaining 90% is the whey and it is fortunately multi-purpose.
To hear and experience the whole story of cheese making, we encourage everyone to visit our shops and farms. There you can learn even more about it and, of course, taste our cheese!

A versatile product
Now we come back to whey and how multifunctional this product is. Whey is widely used in animal feed and has a good influence on intestinal function and resistance of calves, for example. It is also in many consumer products such as certain soft drinks, cosmetics, chocolate and even in, for example, our beer.

Developments in sustainability
But in its original form, it is a large volume which involves a lot of transport. That is why we now have a 'Nanofiltration system' in operation that can thicken this whey from 5% to 20% dry matter. This saves on transport costs, which is interesting for our customers and ourselves. It enables us to reduce transport movements by 30%. And thanks to this new system, we significantly reduce CO2 emissions.

In short, great developments that we are quite proud of!
Greetings, the Henri Willig Cheese Family