Effect Of Mozzarella Cheese Age On It's Meltability And Chemical Composition

Abstract

Four ages of mozzarella cheese of 1, 15, 30 and 60 days old were made. The mozzarella cheese meltability and chemical composition were evaluated for locally made and commercial imported mozzarella (Puck cheese from Denmark). Modified Schreiber test was used to determine the meltability of samples of cheese at four different oven temperatures (60, 70, 100 and 232oC). The meltability of different mozzarella cheese samples were determined based on the melt spread distance. The results obtained show that the meltability of all ages of locally produced mozzarella cheese has significant superior quality compared to imported mozzarella cheese. The local produced cheese (1, 15, 30 and 60 days old) have mean meltability of 8.09, 8.155, 8.1 and 7.955, while the imported cheese has mean meltability of 5.7%. Also the result show the meltability of locally produced mozzarella cheese does not affected by their ages i.e. the mean meltability of them does not differ significantly. The result also shows that all ages of the locally produced mozzarella cheese has higher means of moisture, fat and acidity, but also has lower mean of total solids, protein, pH and ash than imported mozzarella cheese. Both local produced mozzarella cheese and imported cheese does not differ significantly in salt content. Also the result shows that as the age of locally produced mozzarella cheese increased there were no significant differences in the means of total solids, moisture, fat, salt and ash, while the protein acidity and pH differ significantly.