Mushroom mycelium as sustainable protein? Inside Europe’s leading alternative protein research lab

At a Technical University of Denmark lab, researchers are exploring the potential for fungi to be used as meat and seafood replacements.

Transcript

00:00This is our fungal lab which we use to do our experiments and one of the experiments

00:19we did is actually look at the genomic data of our strain.

00:23So we use DNA to actually decode our fungi.

00:27So you can see DNA maybe as a sort of a book of instructions that the fungi use to kind

00:32of grow and exist and metabolize and create flavors and textures as well.

00:39And by comparing the DNA of different types of fungi, we can actually also compare the

00:46different textural properties or maybe flavor properties in these different kinds of fungi.

00:57Here, we're actually using a texture analyzer, so we're actually mimicking kind of the chewing

01:10motion of the mouth to measure what the texture of a specific sample is.

01:27Most of the work is actually done by the fungi themselves and they love growing on these

01:31kind of substrates, so that's great for us.

01:34And normally, you would also use this as a starting point to actually make mushrooms.

01:41But in our case, we stopped there and we started using the mycelium as is.

01:48So don't go on to all the trouble creating those mushrooms, but just use the mycelium itself.

01:58What was the biggest challenge in making this dish?

02:05I think the biggest challenge in producing this dish for the restaurant was actually

02:10to make it consistent and also to produce enough of them for each night.

02:17So every night, they needed about 60 dishes and not all of them, because it's biology,

02:24not all of them grow uniformly.

02:26So they had specific requirements on how beautiful they should look.

02:31And so we had to produce quite a lot to make enough dishes for everybody to eat and enjoy.

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