JPH06261682A - Method for promoting aging of cheese with fruit protease - Google Patents

Abstract

PURPOSE:To industrially and advantageously obtain a soft and tasty cheese in a short time by adding a fruit protease or a substance containing the fruit protease such as a fruit juice or an aqueous extract of a fruit to a cheese, enhancing the flavor of the cheese and promoting the aging thereof. CONSTITUTION:A protease soluble in distilled water is extracted from a fruit such as a melon or a kiwi fruit and the epidermis of the fruit, seed and sarcocarp in a peripheral part of the seed are removed. Distilled water in an amount of 5 times the weight of the sarcocarp part is then added and the resultant mixture is crushed with a mixer for 1min. The crushed liquid is further crushed in an ultradisperser for 2min and centrifuged to collect a supernatant liquid, which is then dialyzed against the distilled water. The resultant dialyzate is freeze-dried to provide a fruit protease fraction, which is then mixed with a curd that is a cheese raw material. Common salt is subsequently added thereto and the prepared mixture is filled in a mold, vacuum pressed and aged at 13 deg.C and 70% humidity to enhance the flavor and promote the aging of the cheese. Thereby, the objective soft and tasty cheese is industrially and advantageously obtained in a short time.

Description

Detailed Description of the Invention

[0001]

FIELD OF THE INVENTION The present invention relates to the production of ripening-accelerated cheese with fruit proteases.

[0002]

2. Description of the Related Art A method using an enzyme is known as a method for accelerating the ripening of semi-hard cheese, and for example, an enzyme such as lipase, esterase or proteinase is used. However, in these known methods, bitterness is imparted to the product, the aging acceleration effect itself is not sufficient, and the production period is not sufficiently shortened.

The present invention uses a fruit protease to
We have succeeded in significantly shortening the production period without producing bitterness, and have confirmed that no special pretreatment is required at that time, and established an industrially superior method. On the other hand, all known methods use enzymes of animal or microbial origin, and use a protease of plant origin, particularly fruit, as in the present invention to industrialize the ripening of delicious cheese. Currently, no successful cases are known.

[0004]

The object of the present invention is to establish an industrial method capable of producing a soft and delicious cheese in a short period of time.

[0005]

[Means for Solving the Problems] The present invention, in order to achieve the above object, for example, the aging period of semi-hard cheese such as cheddar cheese and Gouda cheese is significantly shortened, and the aging rate is equivalent to that of soft cheese such as Camembert cheese. In order to achieve the above, and to develop a method that can be industrially realized without newly adding a complicated operation or process.

In the present invention, a fruit protease is used. As the fruit protease, all fruit-derived proteases can be used, and in addition to purified protease, protease-containing substances can also be used.

As the protease-containing substance, any substance such as fruit juice, water extract of fruit, processed product and the like can be used as long as it contains protease. As the processed product, solvent extract of fruit juice or fruit is concentrated and made into paste,
It broadly includes various processed products such as dried and powdered products.

As the fruit, any fruit can be used as long as it has a protease, and non-limiting examples thereof include the following: melon, watermelon, kiwifruit, pear, avocado, banana, Lemon, grapefruit, Wenzhou mandarin orange, plum, apricot, peach, grape, persimmon, etc.

To carry out the method of the present invention, the case of producing cheddar cheese type cheese will be described as an example. First, milk is sterilized, and then starter lactic acid bacteria are added and mixed with stirring. Next, rennet is added to prepare a cheese curd by a conventional method.

After cutting the cheese curd and removing the separated whey, it is subjected to cheddaring, milling, salting, molding and squeezing. Then, this is aged at around 13 ° C. to obtain the desired cheese.

In the present invention, the fruit protease may be added in at least any one of the above steps. For example, in the salting step, a method such as using salt premixed with freeze-dried fruit protease is used. It may be treated with a fruit protease. This enzyme treatment may be performed once at a time or may be performed several times. It is also possible to mix enzymes from different types of fruits.

The amount of enzyme added is 0.01% of curd weight when freeze-dried powder of kiwifruit water extract is used.
About 1% is sufficient to achieve the intended purpose. When another fruit is used as the enzyme source or in the form of another processed product, the optimum addition amount may be appropriately determined based on the above criteria. In the following, in addition to fruit protease purified products, fruit protease-containing substances are referred to as fruit protease.

Also, in the case of gouda type cheese, after stirring and mixing a starter with sterilized milk, an aqueous solution of rennet is added to prepare cheese curd by a conventional method, and then salt fine powder is added to make it uniform. Mix well with the curd. The curd thus prepared is packed in a mold, vacuum-pressed, then vacuum-packed and aged. At least one of the steps may be carried out by enzyme treatment, for example, salt mixed with enzyme powder is used. It suffices to perform processing such as performing.

As described above, according to the present invention, the fruit protease treatment alone achieves the intended purpose and the excellent one, and there is no need to perform any special treatment other than the above treatment. This is one of the major features of the present invention. Therefore, the conventional apparatus and equipment can be used as they are, and the number of steps is not increased or complicated, which is an excellent industrial method. Moreover, according to the present invention, the aging of the cheese is completed in a short time of about one month, and the aged cheese has no strong bitterness.

Hereinafter, the present invention will be described in more detail with reference to examples.

[0016]

Example 1 A protease soluble in distilled water was extracted from each fruit. After removing the epidermis of the fruit, the seed and the pulp around the seed, distilled water in an amount 5 times the weight of the pulp was added, and the mixture was crushed for 1 minute with a mixer. Further, this crushed liquid was crushed with an ultra disperser at 20,000 rpm for 2 minutes.
The above process was performed at low temperature in order to remove the influence of heat on the enzyme activity. After stirring at room temperature for 15 minutes, insoluble matter is centrifuged at low temperature (Hitachi high speed cooling centrifuge).
The resulting supernatant was removed for 16 hours at low temperature (about 4
Dialyzed against distilled water at (° C.) and lyophilized. This freeze-dried product was used as a crude protease fraction from fruits in the following treatment.

As fruits, eight kinds shown in Table 1 below were used, water extraction was carried out in accordance with the above, yield and protein content in water extraction from commercial fruits were measured, and the obtained results are shown in Table 1. Show.

[0018]

[Table 1]

[0019]

Example 2

(1) Cheese production Cheddar cheese type cheese was produced using 100 kg of jersey cow's milk. Milk was first sterilized and Hansen's mixed starter was added as a starter lactic acid bacterium, and rennet was added as a milk-clotting enzyme.

The resulting curd was cut, whey was separated and eliminated, and then cheddaring and milling were performed, and salt mixed with the freeze-dried powder of the kiwifruit protease obtained in Example 1 was added, and the curd was thoroughly mixed. did. The enzyme powder was used at 0.1% of the curd weight.

Then, according to a conventional method, the thus-prepared curd was molded into a mold, squeezed under vacuum, left overnight, and then aged at 13 ° C. and 70% humidity. In addition,
In the following, the cheese thus produced may be referred to as KP cheese, and the cheese produced without using an enzyme (control product) may be referred to as N cheese.

(2) Measurement of proteolysis rate In order to compare the degree of proteolysis, total nitrogen (TN), water-soluble nitrogen (SN) and non-protein nitrogen (NPN) were measured by the micro-Kjeldahl method, and proteolysis was performed. The ratio of SN / TN (ripening rate) and NPN / TN was calculated as an index showing the degree of. SN / TN (age rate) as a function of time
1 is shown in FIG. 1, and similarly the change in NPN / TN is shown in FIG.
It was shown to.

As is apparent from the above results, KP cheese achieved a ripening rate far superior to that of N cheese for 4 months in a ripening period of only 1 month, and NPN / T.
It turned out that the N rate is also the same. It has been proved that the enzyme treatment as described above produces a remarkable effect that the aging period is significantly shortened.

(3) Polyacrylamide electrophoresis SDS was used for protein degradation (change in casein) during cheese ripening.
-Tracked by polyacrylamide electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE). As a sample, KP cheese produced in Example 2 (1) and N cheese as a control were used, and SDS-
PAGE was performed by the method of Swank and Munkres. The obtained results are shown in FIG.

As is clear from the above results, KP cheese decomposes β-casein well, and it is presumed that this result leads to early achievement of the ripening rate described above and appearance of many peptides described below. It

(4) Analysis of 70% Alcohol-Soluble Peptide For each of KP cheese and N cheese, each cheese 2
After weighing 0 g, it was finely crushed and 20 ml of distilled water was added. After stirring for 1 minute with an ultra disperser, the mixture was allowed to stand for 2 minutes to remove the floating cheese cream. After repeating this operation 3 times, the defatted suspension was adjusted to pH 4.6.
The insoluble matter was removed by centrifugation. Supernatant 6
14 ml of ethanol was added to ml and the mixture was left at -30 ° C overnight. Insoluble matter was removed by centrifugation, and the supernatant was adjusted to 0.
5 ml was dried with an evaporator, dissolved in 2 ml of 0.1% trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), and analyzed by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The conditions of high performance liquid chromatography are as follows. The column used was a Hanui Cosmo Seal Column (Hanai Chemical Co., Ltd.), and peptides were eluted by a linear concentration gradient method (0 to 60%) with acetonitrile. The detection was performed at a wavelength of 220 nm.

The HPLC patterns of the 70% ethanol-soluble peptides in each cheese when each cheese was aged for 0 month, 1 month and 4 months are shown in FIG. 4, FIG. 5 and FIG. 6, respectively.
Shown in. As is clear from these results, in KP cheese, many peptides have appeared as compared with N cheese,
It has been shown that the protein is sufficiently degraded. Moreover, the degree of decomposition of KP cheese is only one month aged and far ahead of that of N cheese aged four months, and the shortening of the aging period by the enzyme treatment is also supported here.

(5) Amino acid analysis Free amino acids were measured for each cheese obtained by aging KP cheese and N cheese for 0 month, 1 month, and 4 months, respectively. Amino acid analyzer (Hitachi model 83)
5) was used to obtain the results shown in Table 2 below. In the table, the unit of free amino acid was expressed as μmol amount per 1 g of cheese.

[0030]

[Table 2]

As is clear from the above results, KP cheese has twice as much amino acid as N cheese or more amino acids at any age, particularly Thr, Ser and M.
It has a feature that the amount of et is large, especially the amount of Met is large.

As described above, KP cheese not only achieves an excellent ripening rate in a very short time, but from the viewpoint of texture, KP cheese aged 1 month is N cheese aged 4 months. In comparison, no particular difference was observed.

From these results, the ripening rate, protein degradation,
From the aspects of amino acid composition and texture, it was clarified that the KP cheese aged for 1 month had no discoloration with the N cheese aged 4 months. In other words, the aging period can be shortened to 1/4 by the enzymatic treatment.

[0034]

According to the present invention, the aging period is greatly shortened. In other words, it became possible for the first time to produce a soft and delicious soft cheese like Camembert in a very short time. Moreover, in that case, the enzyme treatment is sufficient, and no other special treatment or operation is required, and the present invention is outstanding from an industrial viewpoint.

[Brief description of drawings]

FIG. 1 Water-soluble nitrogen (S) during ripening of KP cheese and N cheese
N) shows the change.

FIG. 2 shows changes in non-protein nitrogen (NPN) during ripening of KP cheese and N cheese.

FIG. 3 is an electropherogram of casein during ripening of KP cheese and N cheese.

FIG. 4 shows an HPLC pattern of 70% ethanol soluble peptides in KP cheese and N cheese aged 0 months cheese.

FIG. 5 shows the HPLC pattern of aged one month.

FIG. 6 also shows an HPLC pattern of 4 months of aging.

Claims (3)

[Claims] 1. A method for accelerating ripening of cheese, which comprises using a fruit protease and / or an ingredient thereof. 2. The method according to claim 1, wherein the fruit protease-containing product is fruit juice, an aqueous extract of fruit, and / or a processed product. 3. The method according to claim 2, wherein the fruit protease-containing material is freeze-dried powder of fruit juice and / or water extract of kiwifruit fruit.