Curd has long been a favorite food. Not only as a fresh product of milk fermentation with subsequent heating. It tastes good with noodles, dumplings, but especially as a filling for curd buns and cakes. The company Milk-Agro has been producing both lumpy and spreadable curds for a long time and seven years ago decided to supply flavored curd fillings for bakeries and confectioneries. Since they are very popular, they are now starting to offer them in retail consumer packaging. We talked about the first “test” market delivery with Ing. Peter Kočiš, head of dairy production in Sabinov.
What preceded the decision to start producing curd filling in consumer packaging?
We noticed a growing demand for flavored curd filling among our large buyers and realized there is great market potential in this segment. So we want to offer our customers flavored curd fillings with various flavors, driven not only by the effort to continuously expand the assortment but also to add more products to our healthy range.
Choosing the first product is very important when launching a new product line…
We bet on a proven flavor, and for curd, that is definitely vanilla. We will offer it in a 250-gram consumer package in the form of a so-called casing. It will be pure curd filling with vanilla flavor without raisins.
What will follow?
That remains a trade secret for now. But our company has rich experience with various flavors in the yogurt program, which we will use, and after evaluating the surveys we conduct, we will bring flavors that our customers can already look forward to.
Some consumers associate flavored curd with various so-called termixes. The SABI curd filling is a completely different product...
Definitely. The main difference is that “termixes” are, as the name suggests, thermized products, whereas our SABI curd filling does not undergo such heat treatment that would kill all living organisms in the product. Therefore, our SABI curd filling belongs to the so-called “live” products because it retains the original live mesophilic cultures.
The recipe is a manufacturing secret, what can you reveal to customers?
Everything important for the customer: SABI curd filling with vanilla flavor is made from classic lumpy curd, produced more or less by the original recipe. This is the recipe by which curd was also made at home, just slightly adapted to modern large-scale production conditions. It consists of milk fermenting under the action of live heterofermentative mesophilic cultures, where microorganisms consume lactose (milk sugar), converting it into lactic acid, which causes casein – milk protein – to coagulate during this process. Coagulation occurs during fermentation at temperatures up to 30°C, followed by a heating process at 35 to 40 °C, which dries the curd. At this temperature, neither proteins nor original dairy cultures are destroyed. Then whey is separated in filter bags called plachetkas (bags into which curd with whey is poured), and pressing occurs, separating curd from whey. We do not produce curd by centrifugal methods because centrifugal curd contains less dry matter (only 15%), meaning more “water” (whey), and such curd loses volume during baking in bakery products. The produced curd is then moved to further technological processing, where vanilla flavor is mixed in, and the last operation is packaging into the final container.
This product also has higher nutritional value…
Yes, our filling contains up to 94% curd by weight, and this curd has 23% dry matter. Moreover, after seven years of research and experience, we have adjusted it so that it is suitable both for direct consumption and for bakery and confectionery processes because it is stable during baking on the surface and inside bakery products (up to about 250°C). And like all our SABI products, it contains no GMOs and is gluten-free. Since it is made from skimmed milk, it is truly a tasty, dietetic, and healthy dairy product.
We look forward to this and other flavored curd products.
