wHETHER KOMBUCHA, KEFIR, Sauerkraut, Kimchi or Sourdough. Today’s gourmets do not lack fermented snacks. But for adventurous people, the menu can be more wild. What is an ant ant?
It is not included to milk ants. Instead, unfortunate insects have fallen into warm milk bottles and are fermented overnight after putting them in the ant mound. The fermentation tradition derived from Türkiye and Bulgaria is now revived in the name of science.
Dr. Veronica Sinotte and her colleagues at Copenhagen University have become interested in practice after the research and development chef of the city’s 2-Michael Linstar restaurant approached to learn more about how this fermentation process works.
“Ant is a somewhat commonly used ingredient in Copenhagen’s high -quality gourmet. Dr. Leonie Jahn, a senior researcher at Lyngby’s NOVO NORDISK FOUNDATION CENTER, who supervised the project, said,“ This project is a high -end gourmet of Copenhagen.
“The chief of the alchemist R & D was very enthusiastic about scientific food innovation and was very excited about the acidity of the ant. He wanted to explore it.”
But was it an ant’s form of form that changed milk to yogurt?
To investigate, the researchers visited the village in southern Bulgaria, and SEVGI Sirakova, the co -author of the study, had a family relationship. The villagers no longer made ants yogurt, but some helped me to remember the methods of older generations and to reconstruct temporary recipes. Make milk, bite your fingers, add four red woods, cover with a cheese cloth, and warm the milk until you bury the pot on the ants’ mound overnight. The mound provides additional microorganisms that fall through warmth and probably with cheese claus.
The next day, Shinote sampled the following results.
Returning to the laboratory, the team used additional experiments under the controlled conditions using the related red wooden ants found in Denmark. According to Sinotte, this yogurt tastes slightly different.
Their discovery published in the journal IslandFermentation is proposed as a collaboration process between ants and microorganisms. The formal acid of insects lowers the pH of milk, allowing microorganisms to like acids can thrive, while ants or bacterial enzymes break down milk protein to produce yogurt. In particular, only living ants have the right microbial community.
As a keen “Fermentista,” I found an urge to make my own ant yogurt hard to resist. Sinotte and colleagues advise this. Some ants can carry parasites. In addition, the number of red wooden ants decreases in large areas in Europe, so large -scale harvesting of insects is impossible.
I had a good time to worry about ethics, but my curiosity helped to find suppliers who support funds for the re -introduction of red trees. Relatively relatively, I also hoped to offset the loss of the four ants I planned to sacrifice.
Sinotte’s iSCIENCE PAPER adapted the methodology of the sinotte ‘SSCience Paper, sterilize the rich and mortar, heated 30 ml of milk to 42C, added four crushed ants, and then strained the mixture through the microbiology grade to remove the parasite or ant pieces before removing the parasite or ant pieces overnight.
As a result, it was surprisingly creamy gelatin yogurt. I couldn’t sense lemon notes, a gentle bitter taste. It was actually a little good.
Except for curiosity, such experiments can cause actual application. Researchers believe that ants of ants can make new foods such as vegetable yogurt or to introduce new flavors to existing flavors such as yeast.
Professor Martin Blaser, a human microbial expert in Rutgers University in the United States, said he was excited. “Yogurt’s popular results are that there are some industrial strains that dominate yogurt production.”
“Naturally, my guess is that it’s somewhat equal to yogurt that ant yogurt is industrial. But this kind of approach can expand our food repertoire and give you an interesting and unique taste.”
Ants are not the only unusual ingredients used to historically make yogurt. In Turkey and other countries, people have traditionally used nettle roots to begin fermentation of yogurt using plant materials such as pinecon, chamomile and linden flowers. Investigating these approaches can make it more texture or taste. Netty yogurt for breakfast, who?
