Many people today are trying to eat more protein than ever. Fifty grams of protein is just enough to not waste away, not flourish. Influencer culture projects a world of easily consuming triple that recommendation each day through every conceivable eating occasion: breakfast, desserts, snacks, air! Now that the plant-based revolution has started to wane, it’s been acceptable to get back to your favorite animal-based proteins. And the king is clearly whey protein. With historically cheap prices, highly digestible and complete amino acid profile, a ton of different food applications, and a great texture, it’s clear why.
The biggest issue with whey is the price has almost tripled. GLP-1’s, longevity science, and CPG’s clamoring for fitting both of these new holes in the market has made whey go from $4 to $11 per pound since last summer. The dairy supply chain has been completely flipped on its head. Whey protein is a byproduct of cheese production, but given the gold rush, cheese producers are making more money on the whey derivative. The math has become simple: produce a ton of cheese, maximize whey yields, repeat. It’s likely that this is going to cause an oversupply of cheese (an equally good protein source) in the meantime, but the returns are too good to ignore.
What most folks don’t realize is that all of this whey comes from rennet-set cheeses like cheddar, havarti, swiss or mozzarella. It’s all grouped as “sweet whey” because its more alkaline environs keep the whey in its natural form and make it easy to separate through a mixture of filtration and evaporating excess water. It’s a simple, scalable process but the demand has been bonkers and you can only scale so fast to keep pace. So in midst of sky-high prices, why is there an existing million pound supply chain of whey that is literally dumped down the drain?
Acid Whey
Greek yogurt has seen a meteoric rise since 2005, when Chobani and Fage began to scale the market share from around 1% of the yogurt market to almost half of it. For all the same reasons whey protein has exploded, Greek yogurt has found a similar tail wind: high protein and variety of use cases in both savory and sweet contexts. Greek yogurt is similar to standard yogurt, but strains off whey to concentrate the protein and milk fat. About 60-75% of the pre-strained weight is drained off to make sweet whey’s sibling: acid whey. The vast majority of acid whey is treated in wastewater plants before dumped into municipal waste streams, or used as fertilizer and feedstock bases. This works out to well over 100,000 gallons of acid whey a day!
Why don’t we use it?
The waste stream is still over 90% water, just like its sweet whey cousin. Sweet whey is about 1% protein, and the acid variety is almost equal, though with the gold rush of high prices, why aren’t we looking to recover millions of pounds of whey protein from Greek yogurt production each year? I’m not even adding what other acid-set cheeses like cottage cheese, ricotta, paneer, and cream cheese produce yearly.
The issue with acid whey is that it’s…well…acidic. Lactic acid is a helluva molecule that gets sticky as it’s dried. There are higher amounts of sugars like lactose and galactose also gum things up. And then there’s the incredible amount of minerals like, calcium and magnesium, that are almost the same content as the milk before it was made into cheese. The combination of sticky sugars and acid, and high mineral content can ruin filtration membranes. So acid whey can’t follow the same process or plug into the current infrastructure as sweet whey. I wanted to see why the cheese and yogurt producers have given up on this byproduct and decided to figure out what to do with it myself.
My experiments with acid whey
I’ve never been much of a yogurt guy. The texture just isn’t what I’m looking for in the morning, but I do use it religiously in dressings and other savory contexts. If I’m grabbing any kind of fermented dairy, it’s probably going to be ayran. Thankfully, I love making things that only exist in my kitchen, and if I can share that with someone who likes the challenge of creating, that makes me happy.
Costco has graciously given us a three pack of a Fairlife dupe and I’ve gotten in the habit of using the first one to make yogurt. If you’ve never made yogurt, it’s insanely easy. Get an Instant Pot and put it on the yogurt setting. Pour in a fresh jug of milk (try not to use one that’s already open because milk it loses its bacteria-free, pasteurized state), and steal some of your wife’s precious Chobani to get the probiotics you need to make yogurt.
After 8-10 hours, you’ll have a half-gallon of dense yogurt that you can eat straight out of the pot. I like to start it at night, so I can do the following while sipping some coffee. My move is breaking up the gelled milk and pouring it over cheese cloth in a strainer and placing it in the fridge with a bowl underneath to collect the acid whey. When I come home from work, I have thoroughly strained Greek yogurt that is so dense with fat and protein, that I can spread it over toast with olive oil and salt. I’m a sucker for bread in any context.
Now I have about 1400g of acid whey (I made a double batch), and no urge to dump it. When I lived in Copenhagen, I remember reading about brunost or “brown cheese” - a “cheese” made from reducing down sweet whey with milk or cream until it caramelizes and produces a creamy, rich spread. Thankfully, Netto had it on sale for my cheap-ass student lifestyle and I became addicted. So I came into this experiment with the idea of producing something similar with acid whey.
Knowing that there was a high level of acidity to neutralize to allow for better browning, I slowly added about 0.75 gramsof baking soda per 100g of liquid to the cold acid whey and prayed that I wasn’t making a science fair volcano.
From there, you just bring it up to a boil and let it simmer until you reduce it by about 70%, or basically for about an hour. At this point, you really want to keep a close eye on it because that sticky lactose can scald on the bottom of the pot and you want to use a wooden implement to continuously move it around for the remaining 15-20 minutes. You’ll see it turn from a pale whitish yellow to amber, to a dark brown. You’ll know it’s good to go by putting in a room-temperature spoon in and seeing that it’s about as thick as slightly-diluted honey after about 5 seconds. It’ll be a nice salty caramel that you can use over ice cream, or on top of the toast you put that new thick yogurt on.
There’s a thrill knowing that I may be one of the only people on Earth that has this type of product in my kitchen today. It took me many passive hours to make, but seeing a 200g jar of acid whey caramel sauce in my fridge makes me proud and feel like I’m using my time on something that is important to me, and that I can share with others. There are many folks working on how to make this acid whey product a real consumer-facing product, but this is just my attempt to show some hopeful entrepreneur what could be.