12:13 pm Fri September 28, 2012  Field Notes: Fractionated dairy
ingredients may be ingredient of profit  Fractionated dairy
ingredients are derived from milk and cheese. Credit
SerialK/Flickr     I had never heard of the things until I
started reporting on Kansas Dairy Ingredients, a processing
plant opening next year in southwest Kansas. To find out just
what a “dairy ingredient” is, I got in contact with Dr.
Stephanie Clark, an associate professor of Food Science at Iowa
State University and an expert on various dairy-related topics.
She told me that on a basic level, fractionation is the
separation of milk into its component parts. In a sense, skim
milk is a fractionated dairy ingredient; it's whole milk with
the fat taken out. Scientists can also remove the lactose or the
vitamins and minerals that are in milk. But when people in the
dairy business talk about fractionation, what they're probably
talking about is isolating proteins.  To get dairy protein by
itself, manufacturers start with milk or the whe