ELI5: what causes dairy products ie yogurt, cottage cheese, dip, etc, to separate when opened and been in the fridge? What causes the separation for the water to then arrive on top of the product?
ELI5: what causes dairy products ie yogurt, cottage cheese, dip, etc, to separate when opened and been in the fridge? What causes the separation for the water to then arrive on top of the product?
Comments
Things of different densities naturally separate when left alone. You have to actively work to stop it.
The water on top is the whey. Much like dried goods separate on standing, so do dairy products
The dairy products you described are actually a very complicated mixture of proteins and fats in water.
Fats generally do not like to mix with water, they would separate instantly. However, the fat is oftentimes tiny tiny little droplets of fat suspended in the water.
They generally do pretty well staying in little droplets floating throughout the water, but if enough of them bump into each other hard enough, they can combine. Then you get large regions of fats that will separate from the water.
It’s much more complicated when you get additional things like proteins, which can act as a scaffold in the water, which will trap all sorts of things in there. But the basic premise is that they’re a mix of different things that don’t like to mix. They can stay mixed pretty well in specific conditions, but any alteration to that causes them to separate