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Korean researchers have discovered a way to improve the taste of cultured meat, using a variable-flavor scaffold that can release meat flavor compounds at cooking temperatures to replicate the taste of conventional meat products.
Cultured meat is an emerging type of food that can provide sustainable animal protein, using 3D scaffolds and materials to develop products with similar shape and structural properties to traditional meats.
However, flavor is often overlooked in meat culture strategies, and a paper published in Nature Communications investigated methods to address this problem.
Led by Milae Lee, Woojin Choi and Jinkee Hong of Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea, the study indicates that the flavor characteristics of meat can vary considerably when cooked, depending on the amount and types of amino acids and sugars that produce volatile compounds through the Maillard reaction.
“By introducing a switchable flavor compound (SFC) into a gelatin-based hydrogel, we can fabricate a functional scaffold that enhances the flavor properties of cultured meat,” the paper says.
The team designed a temperature-sensitive scaffold in which a switchable aroma compound is embedded in a gelatin-based hydrogel. The scaffold remained stable during the cell culture period, but released meat aroma compounds when a cooking temperature above 150 °C was reached, thus reproducing the key chemical reactions of conventional meat cooking.
According to chemical analyses and the use of an electric nose, the meat had a taste similar to that of grilled beef. Although this study still uses gelatin, an animal product, it paves the way for more sustainable meat development with the possibility of studying the feasibility of the SFC system without animal-derived materials.