[Sca-cooks] Uses for Whey?

[Terry Decker]

If you don't want to make ricotta (appears to date to the Bronze Age), whey 
can be used to replace water in baking bread (and some other bake goods).

Whey pickling is also period.  It uses roughly 1/4 cup of whey to 1 cup 
water with 1 to 3 teaspoons of salt.  Sterilize the equipment and boil the 
water before use, but cool it to lukewarm so that it doesn't kill the 
lactobacilli in the whey.  Close the container tightly, lactobacilli 
fermentation is an anaerobic process.  Keep the container cool (in period it 
would be in a springhouse or cellar), remembering this is a Northern 
European pickling process.  Root vegetables and cabbages work best in this 
process.

The Russians use it in some soups and make a form of kvass from it, but I 
have no dates to determine when they started this.

The most common uses for whey in period were as a drink, making cheese-like 
food stuffs, and as animal fodder supplement, although references are few 
and far between.  The sheer quantity of whey produced in cheese making and 
the limited shelf life makes animal food the logical primary use.

Bear

My motivation for this is mundane, but I'm curious about period answers.

I make cheese, and a by-product is a LOT of whey.  You get something like 3
quarts of it per pound of cheese.

I'm looking for a use for it that isn't boiling it down to make brunost
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunost>, and isn't using it as soup stock.
I've heard that in period Iceland they pickled vegetables and meat in it,
but since pickling is a little dangerous microbially if you do it wrong,
I'd love to hear from other people who have done something similar.

Have you pickled using whey?  Have you found a better way to get rid of the
stuff?

-- 
Þórfinnr Hróðgeirsson