One thing to bear in mind with quorn: the target demographic is not even the vegetarians. It is - to quote from memory from a biotechnology lecture I attended many years ago
"to fill the niche for a food to target women aged 25-45 seeking to reduce but not eliminate their weekly meat input"
Presumably because they outnumber vegetarians. So, currently, what chance have us lot?
Bastards.
Linnéa76 wrote:Hiking Fox wrote:Linnéa76 wrote:Recently, I found myself tempted by a bag of quorn filets that contained less than 1% eggs, that were said to be organic or free-range...
Quorn is a substance called 'Mycoprotein' that is a fungus grown on an egg-based culture
(Gelert, correct my terminology if needed!) so it isn't just another foodstuff containing really small amounts of milk or eggs; it actually is based on eggs, even if only a small amount of egg is in the actual product when it reaches the shelf.
I didn't know it grows on eggs!
Gross. That makes it a lot less tempting...
You rang, m'lady.
Actually, it's grown in a continuous flow culture in an airlift fermentor on glucose, with ammonia being added to control pH, and biotin, minerals and vitamins to keep the fungus happy.
The egg is only added during processing as a binding agent. They don't use a lot, but they do need to use it
Linnéa76 wrote: So we can fly to the moon, but it's impossible to make egg-free quorn?
it comes down to our old mate, evolution by natural selection. The original isolate of
Fusarium they put in the fermentors grows in nice long stringy hyphae which bind together nicely. Unfortunately, it being a continuous flow culture in an airlift fermentor (English: it gets stirred and bubbled to buggery) there are strong selective pressures on forms which don't produce long stringy hyphae, and they quickly come to dominate in the fermentor. And they don't bind to each other particularly well.
We go on and on about the egg albumen, but many forms of quorn have lots of milk in for recipe reasons.
My external examiner for my PhD viva did develop a vegan quornalike using the tempeh fungus,
Rhizopus oligosporus, grown on quinoa. But last I heard, it went bust.
On the offchance things go well in my viva, I'll ask why.
.
