How is lactose-free milk made?

Nile Red

It is possible to ferment lactose/glucose/galactose to make lactate/lactic acid. Then that could be used to make PLA. Definitely could be a cool. video

This video made me think - how difficult would it be to convert Lactose into Lactic Acid, and then polymerize it into PLA? Might make for a neat video/series.

Nile Red

Yup. According to the milk, I filmed it I'm August! I just was really slow to put the whole thing together

Lindy

Is this something you did and filmed earlier in your old lab and just now edited together? Not that it matters, just curious.

Nile Red

That is an interesting idea. It wouldnt taste nearly as much as a fully sugared coffee though.

Nicolas Raynaud

It gave me a weird idea, what about using a lactose-free milk full of glucose in my coffee, and not add any sugar? I guess that would not make me drink more energy than a no-sugar coffee, but would have the taste of a sugared coffee.

Nile Red

I replaced the old one with the new one.

Silviu T

is it just me or did the video disappear?

Clemen Tom

thanks now i know how its made. i cant drink normal milk since i'm 15. have to use pills if i'm at a restaurant or similar. keep up the good work

Michael Aichlmayr

All the yeast I have are S. cerevisiae and S. uvarum (aka S. carlsbergensis) which is why this piqued my interest. Definitely could be fun to try some others though.

The Gayest Person on Patreon

Nice! Although at 0:50 you forgot to add the spectator ions of friends and family running from the room holding their noses.

Silviu T

FWIW here's a simple and quick way of making a sweet fresh cheese (chemically: separate casein from lactoglobulins, lactalbumin and lactose). For each liter of milk (can be pasteurized but better not ultra-pasteurized) add 0.5% or about 1 teaspoon of calcium lactate. Stir to dissolve, then heat slowly to just below boiling; about 90-95 degrees Celsius. Keep at that temperature about 10 minutes. Stir gently with a spoon every 2-3 minutes. Curds will separate and leave a translucent liquid (lactoserum aka whey). Strain, you got cheese. It's similar to farmer's cheese and delicious. It's also sweet due to some lactose still present. You can wash it 1-2 times with water to make it almost lactose-free if you want. Don't throw away the whey, it's good to drink - or further process into ricotta (lactoglobulins and lactalbumin need low pH plus heating to denature - usually by using lemon juice). Yield about 200g cheese per liter, plus another 50-100g ricotta.

Silviu T

NB there are yeasts that directly ferment lactose. The common beer/baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae isn't one of them. But they do exist, though the fermentation process for them is slow. Some strains that do that are mentioned on the kefir wiki page I linked above. Should be fun to get a pure strain of one of them and inoculate milk, see what results.

Michael Lang

So I downloaded the video and extracted the still frame and zoomed right in...but I still can't read it. Someone with better eyes than me, maybe: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/3Ie1y" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://imgur.com/a/3Ie1y</a> I can kinda make out "First 2 people to email me at ?????@nilered.com with a ???? ???????????? mug" but even that's mostly from context, not actually reading it.

Michael Aichlmayr

Will, you can certainly make it. Starters abound, just search Google for "real fermented kefir" (without the quotes). It's a lot of fun!

Dawnbandit

Also, a milk stout is a stout with lactose added, since yeast can't really digest the lactose into ethanol, it remains in the beer and makes it a bit sweeter.

Michael Aichlmayr

I should have been more specific. I love kefir, and I even had a culture going many (many) moons ago. You're absolutely right. Under those circumstances, lactose can end in alcohol (though it's a little more complicated than just yeast). Beer yeast though doesn't. We even use it to add a kind of sweetness and mouth-feel to the beer because the yeast largely leaves it alone. And while beer yeast will also leave galactos alone, the glucose is the droids the beer yeast is looking for. Might be fun to do something with that. 😀

Will Latinette

Overall, this is a very informative and entertaining video. I am also a 'mutant' and as such have no problem with lactose. This makes me glad. ;-)

Will Latinette

I love the 'fake' kefir... but would like to try the real stuff. Anybody making it commercially?

Silviu T

Lactose is fermentable by some yeasts. But a well-known (OK maybe not so well known) product of mixed milk fermentation (bacteria+yeasts) is kefir. The fermentation is done using so-called "kefir granules" which are macro-symbiotic colonies of selected yeasts and bacteria, encased in a polysaccharide matrix which is secreted by the colony itself. The result is, as you can imagine, sour and slightly alcoholic. It's been known and used for thousand of years. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefir" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefir</a> Caveat: the kefir that you buy in stores is not really kefir but rather a thin yogurt. Another caveat: "water kefir" or tibiscos are not related to kefir at all.

So what's the email address?

Nile Red

ha, that is exactly what it was. I guess you guys win lol. I was curious to see if anyone would actually look closer

Nile Red

hey, those are all some really good suggestions. As to the dilution suggestion...i am embarrassed lol. That is definitely a very simple way to keep testing.

Gary Virta

It looked to me like it said the first two people to email that address about the message would get a free mug, but I couldn't make out the address even on a 40 inch monitor.

Michael Aichlmayr

So this should make milk 'yeast fermentable', hmmm...

Silviu T

I really like the subject. I never thought about lactose-free milk (because as a beneficiary of mankind's latest useful mutation I don't need it) but thinking back it was pretty obvious on how it's done. You could have continued to test glucose levels in the milk at the beginning by using a well known trick in analytical chemistry: dilute the sample. Also regarding the final problem with the taste: apart from more washing, a workaround is not to use calcium chloride. Much better tasting substitutes which work just as well with alginate are calcium lactate and calcium gluconate. I regularly use calcium lactate in my cheesemaking (pasteurized milk needs to be supplemented in calcium to be used for cheese, and calcium chloride would result in bitter cheese - so the gluconate or the lactate are used instead).

Daniel Blake Shoemaker

Hmm, it intersting that lactose free milk due to the lactactase enzyme may have increased simple sugars which would be bad if you have to watch your sugar levels. Squeezing filtered high pressured milk although more expensive seems like another way of removing more lactose through these filters without using enzymes.

Cool video! What's the tiny text in the center around the 3:24 mark? I see what I think is an email address, but I can't quite make it out.

Michael Aichlmayr

Awesome! 👍😎