Cultured meat could get a flavor boost from a new compound that releases a mouth-watering taste upon heating.
The compound is meant to mimic the Maillard reaction that comes from cooking meat — that browned flavor that comes from amino acids mixing with reduced sugars in the presence of heat. Cultivated meat does contain these compounds and produces a Maillard reaction on its own when cooked, but the flavor may not be precisely like natural meat, depending on the level of cell differentiation in the culture, says study lead coauthor Woojin Choi, a doctoral candidate in chemical engineering at Yonsei Univ. in South Korea and a visiting PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The problem with adding synthetic flavor compounds to boost the meat’s meatiness is that most of these compounds are volatile and will dissipate during the weeks-to-months-long culturing process. Researchers set out to answer two questions, Choi says: “How can we stably fix these flavor compounds and how can we realize these flavor compounds during cooking?”
The...
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