Cardoon coagulant experiment

On the farm, there are lots of cardoon plants which are in the family of clovers or artichokes and Lyndal mentioned that the stamens can be used as a coagulant in cheese making. Since we drenched most of the milking goats, we have around 2L of milk a day that we can’t use and so we decided to do an experiment on some of the milk to see whether or not the cardoon could actually coagulate milk.

I collected 8 grams of cardoon stamens and put them into different plastic tubs at intervals of .5 grams and recorded the time until floculation. It turns out, you have to have more than 4 grams of stamens per 500 mL of milk or else absolutely nothing happens. Because the first 4 with amounts less than 4 grams didn’t work at all I decided instead of throwing it out entirely I could just add another 5 grams to the highest amount to see if we could make anything happen. With 7.5 grams of stamens in 400 mL of milk, it started to coagulate at 6 minutes. It wouldn’t get to clean break which is needed for cheesemaking, so we’re going to ditch the experiment for now until the cardoons produce more stamens and then try again with higher amounts per mL of milk.

Even though it didn’t turn out as expected, it still definitely coagulated the milk a little bit and we wrote it down so it’s still science!