Whale cheese

July 5, 2018 12:09 AM

Supposing you could get it, could you make cheese from whale milk? Asking for a kid.
posted by adept256 to Food & Drink (17 answers total)

I’m just guessing, but I bet you could, I mean, it’s a mammal. I also think it would be incredibly rich - think of how much weight a baby whale has to gain to reach adulthood and how caloric its mother’s milk must be. Also, I’m really interested in how you got onto the topic, great question!
posted by Jubey at 12:24 AM on July 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

There’s a table of milk composition by species here. Whale milk (species not specified) is very high in fat and protein which sounds good for cheese, I guess? I am not a cheese maker.
This page describes it as having a toothpaste like consistency, so it’s almost cheese already.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 12:47 AM on July 5, 2018 [5 favorites]

Vice asked that question and others to food experts. The answer was yes.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 12:49 AM on July 5, 2018 [13 favorites]

In that milk table ‘ash’ seems to be the food industry term for assorted inorganic mineral content, btw, if like me you were wondering.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 12:53 AM on July 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

I've run a few ash assays and it is the residue left after putting the material through a furnace at 700C for about 4 or 5 hours. what is left over is quite literally ash. It was actually more complicated than that because you had to make sure that everything was VERY dry before increasing the temperature to 700C so there was a heating profile like 80C for 3 hours then 110C for 2 hours followed by 400C for an hour then the full 700C for the 4 hours. It isn't just the mineral content, it also contains the carbonised remnants of what was there.
posted by koolkat at 1:13 AM on July 5, 2018 [13 favorites]

Because of this question and the Table of Milk Composition I’m now thinking about cat milk cheese. Thanks, I guess? (I would at least try it.)
posted by probably not that Karen Blair at 6:16 AM on July 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

I have been told before that cheese is really only truly viable from ruminants; how does that play into the mix?
posted by uberchet at 7:11 AM on July 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm guessing that cheese is made only from ruminant milk because only ruminants can be practicably milked in sufficient quantity. All the ruminants I can immediately think of (cattle, sheep, goats, buffalo and camels) are milked for cheese.
posted by Logophiliac at 8:13 AM on July 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

As I recall someone on Gastropod discussed narwhal cheese, and possibly ice cream.
posted by jeather at 8:43 AM on July 5, 2018

The person on Gastropod was trying to genetically engineer yeast to produce narwhal cheese - which still seems easier than milking a narwhal!
posted by moonmilk at 9:29 AM on July 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

Rennet is the key substance used to make cheese, chymosin is the key enzyme in it, and casein is the key protein that it curdles.

I do not know how much casein is in whale milk, but perhaps someone else does.

(Edit: Added chymosin.)
posted by clawsoon at 11:06 AM on July 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

I just read a book that contains several chapters on whales. The subject of whale milk comes up at one point, and the author remarks that it is alleged to have a pronouncedly fishy taste.

So, while I am pretty sure you *could* make whale-milk cheese, I betcha it would not be good eatin'.
posted by Dr. Wu at 11:42 AM on July 5, 2018

I was disappointed to see that the Vice article didn't mention pig milk cheese.
posted by Morpeth at 12:04 PM on July 5, 2018

Response by poster: I was explaining that whales are mammals, not fish. They have warm blood, breathe air, give birth, have milk. And that's when this question came up and I was stumped.

I suppose the follow up question is that if we have a super compelling reason to milk a whale, like it cures cancer, how would you do that? I heard some biologists were collecting whale snot with drones, to study whale flu. That's pretty clever but this is going to be way harder.
posted by adept256 at 9:21 PM on July 5, 2018

Whale milk is already a thick, cheesy substance. Remember it has to stay together deep underwater, at high pressures.

Arthur C. Clarke's highly unacclaimed 1957 novel The Deep Range is about a future in which humans have to farm whales, both for meat and milk, in order to survive. It goes into quite a lot of detail about how it would work. If your kid is really obsessed with this topic, you could read it together.
posted by miyabo at 9:41 PM on July 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

Casein is the protein that coagulates into cheese. Whale milk has casein, although not nearly as much as a cow. It's about 40% of total protein while a cow clocks in at about 75% total protein (http://www.icrwhale.org/pdf/SC010151-167.pdf). The viscosity and the high fat content may make the curd act odd but, yes, you can totally make cheese. The curd coagulates when the casein micelles are exposed to an acidic environment and they stop repelling each other and start to get friendly. Rennet, be it animal, vegetal, or bio-engineered, acts as a catalyst and urges the casein to gel. So, warm up the milk, expose it to acid + rennet or, in true cheese making mode, dose it with lactic acid producing bacteria + rennet and you should get some weird-ass cheese. Note: cheese is not just a thick milk, it's a matrix of casein protein that excludes whey protein, water, and most of the lactose. It's sliceable and, once sliced into curds, the liquid starts to get squeezed out of the casein matrix.
posted by Foam Pants at 12:11 AM on July 6, 2018 [3 favorites]

Just a follow up, the whale milk has a very high protein content, I am mentioning percents because, since the casein has to seek other casein out and hook up, all that other stuff is just in the way, or whey I suppose *snicker*. Horrible jokes aside, if the casein has to get around a lot of other crud to gel with it's brethren, that curd might be weak and may not really act like we expect cheese curd to act but it will totally still be there, cheesin' it up. I may have become totally obsessed with milk and cheese chemistry in the last year. It's a real hit at parties. I have no friends.
posted by Foam Pants at 12:35 PM on July 6, 2018 [6 favorites]