Adding Marbling To Fake Meat For That Extra-Realistic Bite

KATHLEEN DAVIS: If you’ve been or been with a vegan or a vegetarian at a Thanksgiving meal, it’s possible that you’ve run into the famous tofurkey roast, a round, plant-based imitation meat. You can find plant-based meats in a lot of different forms these days, like sausages, deli meats, and faux chicken nuggets.

But there are still a lot of challenges to getting h-based meat to mimic their real counterparts. A big challenge for food scientists is marbling, which helps give real meat its, well, meaty texture. My guest today is working on this very question, Dr. David Julian McClements, distinguished professor in food science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for being here.

DAVID JULIAN MCCLEMENTS: Yeah, great. Thanks for having me.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So what is marbling in meat, scientifically?

DAVID JULIAN MCCLEMENTS: Yeah, so marbling is, when you look at meat, you see these white regions and red regions. And the whitish regions are the regions full of fat, which is called adipose tissue. So you have these fat cells, have a whitish appearance because they’ve stuck to light quite strongly. And they’re surrounded by these red regions, which are the fibrous protein-rich regions.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So for anybody who has had plant-based meat, they’ll know that it can be a mono textural experience. You don’t have those pockets of fat and those other irregularities because the fake meat is processed to be that way. So how are you and your team looking at adding marbling to plant-based meat?

DAVID JULIAN MCCLEMENTS: Yeah, we have a few different ways that we’re trying to do it. One way is we use 3D printing. So we create these edible inks.

So we have an edible ink, which is a plant-based adipose tissue. And then we have another edible ink, which is like the lean tissue which has got a natural red color, like an extract from beet in it. And then we’ll use a 3D printer to print like the fat-rich regions and the protein-rich regions so it looks something like real meat.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So are you 3D printing just those elements? Or can you 3D print like a plant-based steak in its entirety?

DAVID JULIAN MCCLEMENTS: Yeah, I mean, I think my goal was always to do a plant-based bacon because I’m a vegetarian now and haven’t eaten English bacon for years and years. And it one of the things I really missed. So I’ve been trying to get my students to do like a nice plant-based bacon product. But you could also do like a roast beef or something like that as well or a turkey kind of product for Thanksgiving.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Right. What are the biggest challenges with marbling and adding this texture to plant-based meat?

DAVID JULIAN MCCLEMENTS: Yeah, because I think if you look at a real meat at the structural level, it’s incredibly complicated. I think we’re so used to these materials every day. We don’t realize what’s actually going on at the molecular level and the structural level. So I think trying to mimic the structural architecture of meat, these little, tiny micrometer-sized fat cells, which are coated by phospholipids and proteins, so trying to mimic that with plant-based ingredients and get the same sort of texture and taste and appearance and nutritional properties is really, really challenging.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: What have been the most successful strategies that you have found in your career?

DAVID JULIAN MCCLEMENTS: Yeah, we use something called emulsion gels. They’ve got fat droplets in them, these very small little beads, which are full of fat. And we coat them with proteins. And then inside them, we might put things like coconut oil, which will give a solidity that you would normally get from the lard you would get in beef or other kinds of products.

So we can make a product that looks and feels a lot like real adipose tissue. But the problem with using coconut oil is it’s full of saturated fat. And saturated fat is not good for your health, especially like heart health.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Right.

DAVID JULIAN MCCLEMENTS: So we’re trying to find alternatives for doing that to make it healthier as well.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: I would imagine another challenge is when you’re turning a raw steak into a cooked steak, when you cook that item, there’s different chemistry going on with that fat compared to the other parts of the meat. Is that something that you have been working on addressing for plant-based meat?

DAVID JULIAN MCCLEMENTS: Yeah. If you look at real beef, at room temperature, it’s quite hard. Then when you heat it, all the fat crystals will melt. And it’ll become softer. And that sort of melting in your mouth characteristic can be really important for certain types of food products.

So we’re trying to mimic that behavior, where it behaves in one way at room temperature, and when you eat it, it behaves very differently, so it releases the oil. And then that lubricates your mouth and gives you a nice juicy mouth feel when you’re consuming the product.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: How close do you think we are to having an effectively marbled piece of plant-based meat available for purchase?

DAVID JULIAN MCCLEMENTS: We’re getting closer. I don’t think we’re– we’re nowhere near there yet. And I think we still need to do a lot of science before we get there. But I think we’re getting better and better at doing it. And there are some reasonably good products in the market now.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So not next year’s Thanksgiving but maybe a decade from now. [LAUGHS]

DAVID JULIAN MCCLEMENTS: Possibly. Possibly a little bit shorter than that.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Besides marbling, what other textural challenges to plant-based meat are you working on?

DAVID JULIAN MCCLEMENTS: Yeah, I think the marbling’s to do with the fat part of the meat. But it’s also the challenge is to do with the lean part of the meat. And the lean part of the meat is what gives it its chewiness in the mouth.

And I think if you’ve eaten a lot of these plant-based products, like Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat Burger, they often are quite mushy when you bite into them. So they break down too easily in your mouth. So we’re trying to make a product that would be more simulate a real meat product and how that behaves so it retains some of its texture in the mouth when you’re chewing it.

And again, that’s really challenging to do because plant-based ingredients are very, very different from animal-based ingredients. So you need to use all these structural architecture methods to try and do that.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: I have heard this argument a lot in my own time exploring meat alternatives, where people say, why are you going for these ultra processed fake meats when you can just eat lentils or beans or get your protein elsewhere? And I’m sure you’ve heard that a lot as well. So as a food scientist, why focus on making plant-based meats better?

DAVID JULIAN MCCLEMENTS: Yeah, I think the ultimate objective is to address greenhouse gas emissions and sustainability and biodiversity. So I think the meat and livestock production is a really big contributor to all those adverse effects on our environment. So we want to create this new generation of foods that are going to be better for our environment and also better for our health.

But if you look at consumers, like 95% of consumers are meat eaters. So we really need to target the meat eaters if we want to have a big environmental and sustainability impact, that we need to make a product that people don’t need to make any lifestyle changes. They can just go to the supermarket, buy a product, it looks the same.

It tastes the same. It cooks the same. So you don’t have to make any changes, but you’re having a big impact on the environment.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Well, that’s all the time that we have for today. I’d like to thank my guest, Dr. David Julian McClements, distinguished professor in food science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Thanks so much for being here.

DAVID JULIAN MCCLEMENTS: Fantastic. Thanks for having me.

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