Meat substitute (fungus/mycelium based)?
Hello,
I recently began to read into meat substitutes for vegeterians and I have come across several pretty interesting concepts that just don‘t seem fully
developed to mimick real meat, so I want to start an experiment on this topic (maybe in the easter holidays?). My plan looks as following: I have
grown mycelial cultures several times and I know some of their of their unique properties that would make the usuable for meat substitute, especially
their consistancy. I would want to grow a mycelium either on a highly concentrated agar plate or in liquid medium, I think bith would work, even
though liquid medium would be preferable. The fungus I want to experiment with is Letinula edodes, after growing a big (has to weight several dozen
grams) mycelium I plan to filter it, knead the filtrant with a traditional wheat flour protein to a dough and for flesh-y consistance crosslink my
„veggie-steak“ with transglutamase (not sure if TG will be able to crosslink „mycoprotein“). For the umami taste I would dunk it in autolyzed
yeast extract as the wort followed by roasting it to get a maillard reaction that gives it additional meaty taste. In theory the combination of
crosslinked filamentous proteins with wheat protein should have a consistency similar to meat? Would this technically be possible or do I have some
mistakes in my logic?
Sorry for asking such a dumb question, but normally all my experiments are solely based on biotechnology, microbiology or electrochemistry
Thanks a lot
|
