Forget about Greek yogurt. Ant yogurt is really where it’s at. And you can trust the recipe, because it’s backed by both Michelin chefs and expert microbiologists.
An iScience paper published today describes how researchers replicated a nearly forgotten yogurt recipe from Bulgaria—an oral tradition with all the ingredients you’d expect from yogurt, except for one: a handful of ants. Essentially, acidic compounds that ants carry for self-defense help drive a unique fermentation process for the milk proteins in a pre-yogurt-ified state. The resulting yogurt tastes surprisingly normal, with a “slightly tangy taste with mild herbaceousness and pronounced flavors of grass-fed fat,” according to the researchers.
“Every seemingly small detail actually had an impact on the safety and flavor of the resulting yogurts, highlighting the wisdom embedded in the traditions,” Leonie J. Jahn, study senior author and a microbiologist at the Technical University of Denmark, told Gizmodo.
Science true to tradition
Incidentally, the project emerged from a series of oral discussions—just like the recipe itself. During a collaboration with The Alchemist, a two-star Michelin restaurant in Denmark, Jahn was informed of a certain ant yogurt served at the restaurant. When she mentioned this to a colleague, he introduced her to one of his PhD students, who happened to be from a Bulgarian village that practiced ant yogurt fermentation.
These interactions naturally led to a field trip to the Bulgarian village, where the researchers learned about the recipe from the villagers themselves. The local community helped identify the right ant species, Formica rufa, or red wood ants common to the region.
Back in Denmark, the team added four live ants to a jar of warm, raw milk, placing a cheesecloth on top. Then the jar was planted into an ant mound for fermentation. The next day, the milk began to sour, starting its transition to a yogurt state.
The antsy details
After confirming the recipe, the researchers set out to concoct a scientific explanation for their culinary project. First, they ran a detailed analysis of the bacterial microbiomes that emerged from the yogurt-ification process. Surprisingly, they found that the ants held a number of compounds conducive to yogurt production.
For instance, formic acid, which the insects carry for self-defense, “can aid yogurt coagulation and shapes the conditions in the milk,” Jahn explained. Not only that, the ants’ lactic and acetic acids transferred over to the yogurt base to accelerate fermentation, whereas their natural microbiome included molecules for texturizing the milk proteins.
Basically, the ant anatomy was an all-natural, yogurt-making machine—but only when they’re alive, according to the researchers. When they tried the same recipe with live, frozen, or dehydrated ants, they found that the latter two weren’t able to ferment the yogurt in the right way.
Later, they brought their results to The Alchemist, who helped create three different ant recipes: an ice cream ant-wich, goat milk mascarpone with ant additives, and a milk wash cocktail curdled with ants. Interestingly, with the exception of the ant-wich, the chefs reported that dehydrated ants were the best fit for their recipes.
That said, the researchers advise against trying this at home “unless users are cultural practitioners or skilled food microbiologists,” the paper noted. For one, ants are generally not authorized for sale as a food product in Europe, where the study was conducted. But picking off a random ant to put in raw milk is typically unsafe, since the insects could be carrying parasites.
Still, the new study is an illuminating account of the impressive science behind ancient traditions and “how we humans depend on so many other creatures for our living—cows, the plants feeding the cow, ants, and microbes,” Jahn said. This
“yogurt and food in general represent a way to engage with all this life around us, to sense it through taste and texture, and might help us to appreciate it more.”
Read the full article here
