The Chemistry of Cheese

AL ROKER, reporting:
You cant have a cheeseburger without it: cheese. Cheddar, Swiss, Mozzarella, Blue, Monterrey jack,
Pepperjack. To keep the chemistry more basic, we wont deal here with whats called American or
processed cheese.
Cheese is an ancient food, dating back some 4,000 years to when humans first domesticated goats,
sheep, yaks and other mammals for meat and milk: the sole basic ingredient in cheese, then and
today.
JULIE YU, The Exploratorium: Cheese is a very concentrated form of milk with the water removed.
ROKER: Turning milk into cheese involves a change in a substance from one common state of matter
to another, in this case, from liquid to solid. Some of these changes can be physical those are
changes that are reversible, like freezing water into a solid ice cube: it can melt into water again.
When a change involves a chemical reaction, it generally cant be reversed and turning liquid milk
to solid cheese is a good example: the cheese can never go back to being milk again. Heres why:
YU: Were going to make the worlds simplest cheese.
ROKER: Julie Yu, a scientist at The Exploratorium in San Francisco whos funded by The National
Science Foundation, starts with milk.
YU: Milk is composed of proteins, fats, sugars and water. The process of making cheese is somehow
removing that water so that youre left with the concentrated mass of the proteins and fats.
ROKER: Thats not so easy. Milk is an emulsion: uncounted illions of globular protein molecules
and droplets of fat are suspended in the liquid. How to separate those from the water, and
concentrate them? Think of panning for gold. If the gold was in the form of tiny individual flecks, itd
be impossible to pan out; itd just flow through any strainer with the water. The gold has to be in
clumps, nuggets, to be sifted out. So how do you get the fats and proteins in liquid milk to form little
nuggets so they can be separated from the water?
YU: Cheesemaking relies on changing the structure of the proteins that are in milk because in order
to separate out the proteins from the water in our milk, we need to change their form.
ROKER: Its called denaturing, which is pretty much what it sounds like: changing the natural
structure or qualities of something.
YU: Proteins are typically folded up in a three-dimensional structure. When theyre denatured, they
relax into a long chain. And so those chains can tangle together and become enmeshed and they
solidify in a way that you are able to strain them from the milk. In general, there are three ways to
denature proteins: one is to introduce heat, one is to introduce high salt, and one is to introduce
acid.
ROKER: Like the citric acid in lemon juice.
YU: Were going to use lemon juice today. The proteins are normally in tight little balls. The acid is
going to relax them. And theyre going to coagulate, theyre going to stick together in this nice gooey
mess. And were going to strain that out and that will give us the cheese.
Im going to pour this through a strainer that I have lined with some cheesecloth. And thats going to
keep the solids behind, which we now call the curds. And the liquid, which we would call the whey, is
going into this bowl.
ROKER: Yes, curds and whey, what Little Miss Muffet was eating, as she sat on whatever a tuffet is,
before unexpected arachnid proximity prompted flight.
YU: Once we strain out all of the whey it firms up into this nice ball of fresh cheese. There are some
fresh cheeses that are made this way, just by simply adding acid. But the majority of cheeses are
made in another way. They use a bacteria and an enzyme in order to coagulate their proteins.
ROKER: An enzyme called rennet, which cheesemakers can buy in tablet form.
YU: Rennet is an enzyme thats actually in the stomach lining of most animals. Its made to digest
milk proteins. Rennet further breaks down the proteins and creates this nice gooey mesh and gives
you cheeses of different textures.
ROKER: Rennet may explain how those ancient ancestors of ours made the first cheese.
YU: Its possible that someone had a pouch made out of animal stomach and was holding milk inside
of that. Any enzymes present in the stomach would break down the milk and when they poured out
their milk they would have been surprised to find curds and whey.
ROKER: Today cheeses come in a global array - at least 670 different kinds are listed in a leading
cheese database. Chemistry is the reason all those different textures and flavors develop during
cheese processing and aging: fermentation, oxidation, dehydration, bacterial and mold growth.
Theyre all chemical reactions. So, there you are: a basic explanation of the chemical processes that
turn liquid milk into solid cheese and turn a hamburger into a cheeseburger.








The Chemistry of Burgers

AL ROKER, reporting:
The burger part of a cheeseburger is short for hamburger, which is what Americans call a cooked
patty of ground meat, usually beef. Immigrants to the U.S. in the early 1900s brought with them
favorite recipes, one of which was shredded or minced cooked beef, a back-home favorite of many
Germans, some of whom were from the German city of Hamburg, and known as you guessed it,
Hamburgers.
Anyway, by the 1940s, the hamburger was a fully assimilated American favorite and still is, along
with its cousin, the cheeseburger. U.S. meat producers estimate Americans eat 14 billion
hamburgers a year. Burgers start off like this: pieces of red meat, usually less-tender cuts of beef,
put through a grinder.
KENT KIRSHENBAUM (New York University): The meat itself is composed of ground muscle tissue,
usually from a cow. And that will contain a large amount of protein; also contains some fats and
quite a bit of water.
ROKER: The chemistry of food, especially meat, is a research focus for Kent Kirshenbaum, a
chemistry professor at New York University funded by the National Science Foundation. As he says,
meat contains a lot of proteins, chain molecules made up of amino acids strung together like beads
on a necklace. Something like this.
KIRSHENBAUM: One of the major components of muscle, of meat, is a protein called myoglobin.
That is composed almost completely of helices or coiled regions of the protein chain.
ROKER: Helices is the plural of helix, a shape like a spring, or a spiral staircase. You may be familiar
with DNA: a double helix.
KIRSHENBAUM: These helices are bundled together within the protein structure, and deep inside
that protein there is a component of the protein that has one iron atom tucked away right in the
center of it. Myoglobin was actually the very first protein whose structure was understood or solved.
ROKER: A feat that won two British chemists, John Kendrew and Max Perutz, the Nobel prize in
chemistry in 1962. Myoglobin is a major reason red meat is red.
KIRSHENBAUM: The red color that we see in meat is actually not coming from the blood. That red
color is coming from that myoglobin molecule in the meat tissue.
ROKER: That is, in fresh, raw meat. Meat changes color, in a series of chemical reactions, when you
apply heat: Put a burger on a grill or in a skillet, and it turns brown because of what happens to the
myoglobin as youre about to see. Julie Yu is an NSF-funded chemist at The Exploratorium in San
Francisco.
JULIE YU (The Exploratorium): So were gonna cook some hamburger patties two different ways, and
were gonna see how the color of the patty tells us something about the chemical reactions that
took place as it cooked. Im gonna put one patty into this boiling water. And you can see pretty
instantly that the color of the meat changes, from the bright red that it was when it was raw to kind
of this dull gray. And this other patty, Im gonna put into this pot. So the sizzle that you hear when
the raw meat hits the hot plate is actually the water molecules on the surface of the meat, boiling
off. So the temperature of this pot is very high.
ROKER: As the burgers cook, the myoglobin proteins in the meat do what atoms and molecules
generally do when heated: move, or vibrate, faster and faster, which denatures the proteins,
changing their natural shape.
KIRSHENBAUM: Generally, proteins are very carefully composed into precise arrangements. When
we add heat to hamburger meat to cook it, the atoms in those proteins could begin to move around,
and those very careful arrangements could begin to become scrambled or unfolded.
ROKER: As the proteins change shape, or denature, particularly around the iron atoms, the color
changes. The burger boiled at one temperature turns grayish brown. The burger pan-fried at a
higher temperature is a richer, darker brown.
YU: And the texture of it is a little crusty, compared to the soft, boiled burger.
ROKER: That darker browning on the outside of the fried burger is due to whats called the Maillard
reaction. Louis-Camille Maillard was a French chemist in the early 1900s who studied the science of
browning. In fact, the Maillard reaction is also called the browning reaction.
Maillard found that when he heated amino acids, remember the beads in the protein necklaces?
Plus sugars like those in carbohydrates, which are in almost all natural foods, including meat, the
substance turned brown, different shades, depending on the temperature, which you can see when
Julie Yu cuts her two burgers open.
YU: When we cut inside the burgers, youll see that inside the color is exactly the same. The inside of
the meat patty wasnt exposed to the high temperature of the pan and so it wasnt able to undergo
the high-temperature Maillard reaction, which create these nice crusty brown bits that are very
flavorful to us.
KIRSHENBAUM: The Maillard reactions result in development of rich brown colors. And they also
generate an incredible variety of different flavor molecules as well. Other places where you might
see a browning reaction are on a nice rich piecrust, or on a nice brown piece of toast.
ROKER: A toast, then, to meat and to heat and to the chemical reactions that turn this into this.
YU: Oh, its so perfect. Its gonna be the best-tasting burger ever!v
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