Plant-based substitutes like tempeh and bean burgers offer protein-packed choices for individuals looking to cut down on meat. However, mimicking the taste and smell of meat is difficult, and many companies use artificial additives for this purpose. A recent study in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry has revealed a promising solution: onions, chives, and leeks can generate natural compounds similar to meat’s savory flavors when fermented with typical fungi.
Innovative Approaches to Natural Meat Flavoring
When food producers want to make plant-based meat alternatives taste meatier, they often add precursor ingredients found in meats that transform into flavor agents during cooking. Or, the flavoring is prepared first by heating flavor precursors, or by other chemical manipulations, and then added to products.
Because these flavorings are made through synthetic processes, many countries won’t allow food makers to label them as “natural.” Accessing a plant-based, “natural” meat flavoring would require the flavoring chemicals to be physically extracted from plants or generated biochemically with enzymes, bacteria or fungi. So, YanYan Zhang and colleagues wanted to see if fungi known to produce meaty flavors and odors from synthetic sources could be used to create the same chemicals from vegetables or spices.
Alliums Unlock Meaty Aromas
The team fermented various fungal species with a range of foods and found that meaty aromas were only generated from foods in the Allium family, such as onions and leeks. The most strongly scented sample came from an 18-hour-long fermentation of onion using the fungus Polyporus umbellatus, which produced a fatty and meaty scent similar to liver sausage.
With gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, the researchers analyzed the onion ferments to identify flavor and odor chemicals, and found many that are known to be responsible for different flavors in meats. One chemical they identified was bis(2-methyl-3-furyl) disulfide, a potent odorant in meaty and savory foods.
The team says that alliums’ high sulfur content contributes to their ability to yield meat-flavored compounds, which also often contain sulfur. These onion ferments could someday be used as a natural flavoring in various plant-based meat alternatives, the researchers say.
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.2c01688
The authors acknowledge funding from the Adalbert-Raps-Stiftung.
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8 Comments
Here’s the best way to make it more meaty, feed it to pigs and then butcher them when they are around 250-300 lbs.
There are several reasons people choose plant-based protein alternatives. It’s not because they don’t like the taste of meat. One main one is because they want to contribute to the cruelty of factory farms.
Isnt any meat “plant based” since most of them EAT PLANTS!!!!!
And scientists, along with the government, can take their highly processed and chemically engineered poison; and shove it all up their clacker!
Choice my friend.
For the obscenely wealthy and their pawn and puppet governments, corporations and scientists to even imagine being smarter than millions of years of evolution is insanity of the highest order. The most likely unintended consequences are a worsening of multiple global epidemics of chronic diseases and/or the earlier extinction of humanity. Get real and focus on the real problem and solution; overpopulation and the intelligent humane gradual reduction of the global human population to about the 1980 level. Extremist “business as usual” is inherently self-destructive to our allegedly “advanced” species.
Can’t agree with you more.
Thanks, a rare and very welcome comment.
As an engineer, I’ve been attacking this problem with other Brave Researchers in the Defense-Industrial complex for some time. We have named our prototype ‘Continuous Oxidizing Weapon’ or ‘COW’ for short.
Early tests show that ‘COW’ can be moved to any location and process a steady stream of low-quality plant starches and proteins and, through advanced bio-fermentation and conversion processes, produce large quantities of savory ‘Meals Edible for All Time’ (‘MEAT’), with a biocompatible fertilizer as a natural by-product! Progress has been slow as researchers continually eat the test results by accident, but we are turning up the heat on our efforts and expect searing praise.