A bi-weekly newsletter about the intersection of food and technology, what that means for people who love food and make food, and want to know what they're eating.
Anthony Bourdain was known for traveling the world exploring undiscovered gems and sharing cuisines and cultures through the eyes and ears of local guides. I’m becoming known (by some—at least me!) for trying all the oddities that aren’t on the market yet.
This week, I tasted on steroids. Today’s newsletter is a photo journal of some of the products I swirled and sampled while on-the-go in New York. I hope you enjoy it.
Steakholder Foods is building giant 3-D printers to laserprint everyday food like steak and fish. This is “grouper” that I ate at Future Food Tech in Manhattan this week. It’s made from plant-based ingredients like soy and pea. Eventually, the Israel-based startup hopes to print fish filets from cultivated fish cells. When and if this will happen is still the question. It was pretty delicious and I thought it had nice texture and taste—better than most other plant-based fish options.
I spotted watermelon seed powder at the SFA Fancy Food Show at Javits on Monday, June 26th. I love seeing new possiblities for plant-based protein sources. The guy at the booth said they plant and harvest varieties of melons that are extremely high in seeds—it’s not the one you might buy from the market. Sadly, he didn’t have any photos of the melons they use. When I mentioned seeing this protein to a trusted source, they told me that Miyoko Schinner (formerly of Miyoko’s Creamery) was doing some R & D with the seeds as a base for her cheeses.
I tried two different dairy milks this week. Both were made using Perfect Day’s non-animal whey protein. This means it’s still cows’ milk, which also means if you’re allergic to dairy proteins you can’t drink the stuff. I tried another brand of this style of milk last year and was surprised by how much it smelled and tasted like animal dairy. (Because of the smell, I didn’t like it.) These two brands did not smell like cow’s milk (phew) and both had a creamy mouthfeel. I didn’t get a chance to taste them in my green tea, which would be the ultimate test. If you want to buy them, Bored Milk and Strive are available online.
I tasted decadent chocolate brioche on Tuesday at Rethink’s Future Food Tech. It was made with an egg replacer based on elements extracted from Chlorella algae. You might take this as a supplement, or know that it’s dark green, but Algama extracts the protein and fat from algae and blends it with other powders to create an ingredient that bakers might use to swap eggs in recipes. Pastry lover me thought this was delicious. Infrequent baker me wants to sample this again with a knowledgeable expert in baking.
There’s so much more to share but I don’t want to bog you down. Consider this an amuse bouche of what I devoured this week. For folks in the industry, I’ve added a paid option to my newsletter and will be starting a paid-only version that focuses on what I’ve tasted that will go deeper into formulation, sensory analysis, branding and impressions. Intrigued? I hope so. Have a great 4th of July if you celebrate that stuff.
Where you can find me?
I’m quoted in a issue of Food Fix about cell-cultivated meat’s recent USDA approval. If you don’t know it, Food Fix is a wonderful policy-focused newsletter by Helena Bottemiller Evich that you should subscribe to.
Matt Newberg of Hngry.TV “rolled his eyes” over my recent story in Fast Company about the future of all cultivated meat. I wrote that it will be a hybrid mish-mash of plants and meat cells. Matt wrote an Op-Ed about what *he* thinks of the industry in response to mine. (I love when this happens.)
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