Current research study reveals that fermenting alliums like onions with fungi can naturally simulate meat tastes, using an appealing option for enhancing plant-based meat options without synthetic additives.
Plant-based replacements like tempeh and bean burgers provide protein-packed choices for individuals wanting to reduce meat. Imitating the taste and odor of meat is challenging, and numerous companies utilize artificial ingredients for this function. A recent study in ACS Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry has exposed an appealing solution: onions, chives, and leeks can generate natural substances comparable to meats tasty tastes when fermented with normal fungi.
Ingenious Approaches to Natural Meat Flavoring
When food producers want to make plant-based meat alternatives taste meatier, they often include precursor active ingredients found in meats that change into taste representatives during cooking. Or, the flavoring is prepared first by heating flavor precursors, or by other chemical manipulations, and after that contributed to products.
Because these flavorings are made through artificial procedures, many nations will not permit food makers to identify them as “natural.” Accessing a plant-based, “natural” meat flavoring would need the flavoring chemicals to be physically drawn out from plants or generated biochemically with fungis, enzymes or germs. So, YanYan Zhang and associates wished to see if fungis understood to produce meaty flavors and odors from synthetic sources might be utilized to create the same chemicals from vegetables or spices.
Alliums Unlock Meaty Aromas
The team fermented various fungal types with a variety of foods and discovered that meaty fragrances were only produced from foods in the Allium household, such as onions and leeks. The most strongly aromatic sample came from an 18-hour-long fermentation of onion utilizing the fungus Polyporus umbellatus, which produced a fatty and meaty fragrance similar to liver sausage.
With gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, the scientists evaluated the onion ferments to recognize flavor and smell chemicals, and found lots of that are understood to be accountable for various tastes in meats. One chemical they identified was bis( 2-methyl-3-furyl) disulfide, a powerful odorant in meaty and mouthwatering foods.
The team states that alliums high sulfur material adds to their ability to yield meat-flavored substances, which also frequently include sulfur. These onion ferments could sooner or later be used as a natural flavoring in numerous plant-based meat alternatives, the researchers state.
Reference: “Sensoproteomic Discovery of Taste-Modulating Peptides and Taste Re-engineering of Soy Sauce” by Manon Jünger, Verena Karolin Mittermeier-Kleßinger, Anastasia Farrenkopf, Andreas Dunkel, Timo Stark, Sonja Fröhlich, Veronika Somoza, Corinna Dawid and Thomas Hofmann, 20 May 2022, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.DOI: 10.1021/ acs.jafc.2 c01688.
The authors acknowledge financing from the Adalbert-Raps-Stiftung.
Plant-based substitutes like tempeh and bean burgers provide protein-packed options for individuals looking to cut down on meat. A current research study in ACS Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry has exposed a promising solution: chives, onions, and leeks can generate natural substances similar to meats mouthwatering tastes when fermented with typical fungis.
Accessing a plant-based, “natural” meat flavoring would require the flavoring chemicals to be physically extracted from plants or generated biochemically with enzymes, germs or fungis.