Serpa is an ovine raw milk cheese widely appreciated by the consumers. However, products may be seen with reservations in terms of safety or technological defects. To overcome that, addition autochthonous starter culture ensure cheesemaking process optimization and microbiota dominance. In this work, protective performance eleven lactic acid bacteria strains, isolated from Protected Designation...

This study explored the bacterial diversity of brines used for cheesemaking in Italy, as well as their physicochemical characteristics. In this context, 19 brines used to salt soft, semi-hard, and hard Italian cheeses were collected in 14 commercial cheese plants and analyzed using a culture-independent amplicon sequencing approach in order to describe their bacterial microbiota. Large NaCl con...

Cheesemaking from batches of raw ewe’s milk was carried out via inoculation with wild strains of Lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis ESB110019 and Lactobacillus plantarum ESB5004 independently, or combined with each other. Those two strains had been isolated from the native microflora of typical Serra da Estrela cheese. One control batch was processed in parallel without addition of any starter. T...

Milk samples with low (<500,000/ml), medium (500,000-1,000,000/ml) and high (1,000,000-2,000,000/ml) Somatic Cell Counts (SCC) were obtained from a flock of 120 Sarda breed ewes. Milk was analysed for chemical composition and rheological properties (Formagraph), and used for a laboratory scale cheesemaking. The milk of the three groups showed differences (P<0.01) in pH, lactose, whey protein an...

Pea (Pisum sativum L.), a protein-rich legume seed well adapted to many climatic areas and widely used for feed and food, was fed to Italian Friesian breed cows for 16 weeks to assess its effects on milk yield and production, renneting properties and metabolic responses. Cows within each group were assigned to two isonitrogenous and isoenergetic concentrates based on corn plus soybean meal or p...

The present paper explores the diversity of mycobiota inhabiting raw milk sampled at different altitudes (1400 m, 1800 m, 2200 m) from cows grazing Alpine pastures of Valle d'Aosta (North-Western Italian Alps). To this aim, multilocus sequencing was performed at barcodes commonly used for fungal identification (ITS1, D1/D2 domains of the 26S rRNA gene, and part of the β-tubulin gene). A total o...