Posted on 11/04/2025 1:57:59 PM PST by nickcarraway
In doing so, the team has revived an ancient Bulgarian fermentation method
There was a not-so-secret ingredient in the ice cream sandwiches, creamy cheese and milk-wash cocktails being served at Alchemist, a two Michelin-star restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark, in recent years: ants.
The team's experiments began with an accidental discovery, reports CNN’s Amarachi Orie. They left milk with an ant in it inside their refrigerator, and noticed the milk soon started to curdle. From there, the restaurant, which aims to “transform and transcend the nature of food and dining,” recreated a nearly forgotten ancient Turkish and Bulgarian recipe for making yogurt from the six-legged creatures.
The success of that venture caught the attention of anthropologists, microbiologists, food scientists and more, who sought to understand what it is about ants that could ferment yogurt. The culmination of their research was published last week in the journal iScience.
“Today’s yogurts are typically made with just two bacterial strains,” microbiologist Leonie Jahn, one of the paper’s authors, says in a statement. “If you look at traditional yogurt, you have much bigger biodiversity, varying based on location, households and season. That brings more flavors, textures and personality.”
The fermentation of milk into dairy products such as yogurt and cheese dates back around 9,000 years to Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey, according to the paper. For millennia, yogurt recipes varied greatly by cultures and regions, with different groups introducing different microbes into milk to start fermentation, by adding materials such as pine cones, camomile and nettle roots. That started to change in the 1900s, when yogurt was industrialized and makers focused on just a few bacterial species.
To trace back the history of ant-based yogurt, Jahn’s team got in touch with Sevgi Mutlu Sirakova, a Bulgarian anthropologist who studies the culinary traditions of the small village she grew up in, per the New York Times’ Kate Golembiewski. One of those traditions involved dropping red wood ants into milk to make yogurt, so the researchers visited Mutlu Sirakova’s village, Nova Mahala, to try the recipe for themselves. “We dropped four whole ants into a jar of warm milk by the instruction of Sevgi’s uncle and community members,” lead author Veronica Sinotte says in the statement.
Quick fact: Ant status The European red wood ant, or Formica polyctena, has been categorized as a near-threatened species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species since 1996. The team left the jar buried in a red wood ant colony overnight. The following day, they removed the insects from the milk, which had started to thicken and sour, and tasted the concoction. It “had a slight tangy taste with mild herbaceousness and pronounced flavors of grass-fed fat,” per the paper.
Next, the researchers wanted to understand what it was about the ants that could ferment yogurt. So, back in the lab in Denmark, they conducted a series of tests using a similar species of ant, and concluded that the insect emits enzymes and microbes that work together to congeal the milk into yogurt. The ant’s bacteria-produced lactic and acetic acids create the yogurt culture. Formic acid, a part of the ant’s chemical defense system, gives the yogurt an acidic flavor, and fosters a healthy environment for the microbes.
“It’s really a sequence of events that is unlike any dairy fermentation I’ve ever seen,” Paul Kindstedt, a cheese historian and food science professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, tells the New York Times. “There’s really a lot of interesting science to be done to understand this strange yogurt.” Kindstedt was not involved in the study.
The researchers made yogurt with live, frozen and dehydrated ants, and found that live ants made for the best yogurt.
Informed by the lab results, the research and development team at Alchemist devised three culinary applications of the ant-based fermentation. For their “ant-wich” ice cream sandwich, the chefs made an ant yogurt ice cream from live ants, an ant gel filling made from dehydrated ants, and an ant-shaped cookie. They also devised a mascarpone-like creamy cheese by using ants as a coagulant. For their third ant-based creation, the Alchemist team devised a milk-washed cocktail, which uses milk and an acid in tandem to curdle and filter a spirit, leaving a smoother texture and a softer flavor. In this case, the team used dehydrated ants instead of typical acids like lemon for their milk wash. The cocktail featured brandy, génépi liqueur and apricot liqueur, and was garnished with four frozen ants.
The result was “absolutely incredible,” Sinotte tells CNN, “because you got the acidity of the ants, which is lemony but a little bit slightly more complex than lemony.”
But amateur cocktail enthusiasts shouldn’t try the Alchemist recipe at home. The researchers warn that ant-based fermentation is best left to the pros, because it can introduce a number of food safety concerns. Live ants may contain a parasite, and freezing then incubating ants can create food-borne pathogens. Plus, European red wood ants are considered to be a near-threatened species due to recent population declines, so their wide-scale use is not sustainable.
Still, the paper’s interest in traditional fermentation methods in general could have wider application, Martin Blaser, a human microbiome expert at Rutgers University, tells the Guardian’s Linda Geddes.
“Nutritionally, my guess is that ant yogurt is more or less equivalent to industrially produced yogurt,” he says. “But for the discerning, this kind of approach could possibly broaden our repertoire of foods, giving us interesting and unique tastes.”
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No.
Gross. Leave the ants alone.
Just wasting time and money , do something real guys ,LOL
Yeah, well..Nope.
Americans should team up to make silage out of these scientists.
Eat a satchel of Richards first
Where is Peta when you actually need them ?
Hey, they choose to come in our kitchens!
Nasty.
Don't eat any yogurt made by the Hakalugi people.
I knew it!!
How wonderful that his friend was
not interrupted by his annoying
screams for help.
Now that’s dedication to task. 🤣🤣🤣
I bet u can do the same thing using bullshlt.
Antgurt
Good idea. Silage they are.
I have yogurt almost every night for dessert. Black raspberry fat-free from Trader Joe. Yum, sweet enough and good for me. What’s not to like?
“Scientists and Chefs Team Up to Make Yogurt From Ants”
ants have tiny souls too, so wholesale slaughter is no way to go ... why not just make Yogurt from dirt so no ants are harmed? ...
“Formic acid ... gives the yogurt an acidic flavor”
awesome: now one can contract ant-bite-allergy without getting bit by an ant!
WHY?
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