Milk Products Tasting Lab

As my days at Kennard-Dale continue, I am becoming more comfortable and getting into the swing of things! I enjoy each day I am able to spend at KD with my students and with Ms. Smith!

This week was a fun week for me as well as my students in Animal Care and Management. We are wrapping up our unit of instruction on Dairy Science. Throughout our unit on Dairy, my students and I learned about the dairy industry, common dairy cattle breeds, evaluation of cattle, common diseases in cattle, and then we analyzed milk composition and production as well as products produced with milk.

So as we are wrapping up milk production, my students and I spent one day discussing processing of milk and how milk is made safe for our consumption. We then discussed factors that sometimes cause milk to become unsafe or carry off-flavors. On Wednesday, my students and I discussed 11 different off-flavor that can occur in milk and how they are caused as well as how dairy farmers can prevent these off-flavors from getting into the milk that we drink out of the milk carton.

After we discussed off-flavors we identified another valuable milk product, which is cheese. We identified 4 factors that help use identify cheese samples, including four sensation devices on our tongue that detect certain flavors.

After discussing all of this material my students were anxious and ready to put their knowledge to the test or to the taste.

Finally, on Thursday we conducted our milk products tasting/sensory lab. For this lab I made 5 different samples of off-flavored milk. The off-flavors that I used were: flat/watery, salty, foreign, feed, and onion flavored. All of these samples except the foreign one, looked exactly like safe white milk. So my students could not necessarily detect the off-flavor just by looking at the sample. They had to use their sense of smell and finally their sense of taste to determine the off-flavor. As my students took each sample their was lots of drama as they all chattered trying to determine what the off-flavor was and how is was so gross and disgusting. After all the samples were tasted, we identified each sample and it's off-flavor, determined possible causes and how to prevent the off-flavors.

My students then got to sample 5 different samples of cheese. Again, using their senses and identifying the cheese based on the 4 factors (body, texture, color, flavor) we talked about in class, they described each sample and at the end we identified each cheese sample.

The last experiment in our lab, was a pudding comparison. This was my favorite portion of the lab because I felt as though it really brought together the importance and difference of various milk samples and milk composition. I made four pudding samples. Each sample was made with an instant vanilla pudding mix. The only difference in each of the four samples was the milk that was used. In the first pudding mix, I used 1% low fat milk. The second sample was made with skim milk, the third sample was made with whole milk, and the last sample was made with evaporated milk.

To complete this portion of the lab, Ms. Smith and I gave each student I dollop of each pudding sample. Again, using their senses my students had to determine how milk composition alters or affects the composition of a product.  Surprisingly, to me the visual composition of the puddings were obviously different in each sample. The first two samples were more running or thin, while the others were very thick. Also the color was different among all four samples, ranging from a bright yellow to an almost light brown color. The taste was not as different among the sample as most of the students said all the samples tasted sweet  however, there was a difference in which milk provided the best flavor. Most said whole milk and evaporated milk, tasted the best.

My favorite part of the pudding lab was the lightbulb moment when my students were able to analyze how various milks with varying compositions results in altered product composition.

I felt this was a great end to our dairy unit and my students really enjoyed the day of tasting food (of course they did, they are kids). As my students came in to class that day, they were all excited and ready to go and when I asked them if they liked the lab they all shouted yes, as well as asked if we could have good tasting milk for a treat on Monday!

Thankful for another week with Ms. Smith and our students at KD!
-Ms. Timmons

"You never want to get on a plane where the pilot learned to fly from a worksheet."-Anonymous