Cheese Lab Conclusion

Time to Curdle (minutes)
Curdling Agent:	chymosin	rennin	buttermilk	milk (control)
Acid	5	5
Base
Cold
Hot	5	10
Temp control	15	15
pH control	15	10

In this lab we asked the question, what are the optimal conditions and curdling agents for making cheese? We found that hot and acidic conditions with chymosin were the best for curdling cheese. The time in acids was only 5 minutes for both chymosin and rennin. Buttermilk and milk both didn’t curdle within 15 minutes. In hot environments for chymosin it only took 5 minutes to curdle as well and 10 for rennin. Since rennin comes from a calfs stomach, warmer and more acidic environments are better for curdling. This data supports our claim because acidic and hot temperatures made the cheese curdle the fastest.

While our hypothesis that warmer and more acidic conditions with chymosin with make cheese curdle faster, there could have been errors due to how the lab was set. We checked to see if it curdled every five minutes, but the acid ones might have curdled even faster than 5 minutes. This would have affected the data. It might have shown that chymosin was faster than rennin.  Another data we might have made is when we were measuring how much curdling agents to put into the milk. The medicine droppers had air bubbles in them and it was hard to measure them exactly. Because of that, each test tube had different amounts of curdling agent. Due to these errors, in future experiments I would recommend for us to be more careful and check ever two minutes rather than five.

This lab was done to demonstrate chemical reactions. From this lab I learned that different conditions would affect the results which helps me understand the concept of chemical reactions. Based on my experience from this lab, I know that warmer and more acidic environments would help cheese curdle faster.