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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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Wow, I can't wait for that.! (spit)
I thought of the movie “The Menu”.
Well fantastic!
Maybe they can figure out how to make lattes from toenail fungus as well?
Humus, from uncles.
Hate to break it to you but, cultures of Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus are found commonly in animal gut tracks and manure as well.
The original yogurt strains from with all industrial yogurt is made was isolated from “naturally fermenting milk inside animal skins, stomachs and intestines.
All of those bacteria are gram positive and every one of them lives and thrives inside mammal species GI track.
So yeah about the air thing it’s a giant nothingburger compared to industrial fermentation processes. Humans have been using bacteria from the air, guts, manure, fish guts oh yeah two of the three above bacteria also love fish guts it’s how you ferment and make fish sauce same acid making bacteria. You take fish whole fish unguted or it won’t work, you put them in a clay barrel outside in Vietnam heat for THREE YEARS and let those bacteria do its work the only other ingredients is sea salt to pull moisture out and give the gut bacteria a chance to take over before e.coli does. Eat up big guy. Don’t even ask where beer yeasts or blue cheese, brie or stinky feet cheese get it’s cultures hint the last is exactly what
It smells like same bacteria on human feet and pits makes that cheese.
Some cheeses are made with the same bacteria as stinky feet it’s literally the same species of bacteria.
We are a meta organism. Humans have more mass in bacterial DNA that human and have more bacterial cells by number than human cells , trillions in our GI track you would die without them and people do when they take antibiotics and it kills their gut symbiosis, you know how they try to save your life? They ask a family member for fecal matter and put that in capsules which you swallow or die, the other way is less pleasant they go up the nose with a hose all the way past the stomach into the upper GI and yup liquid inject a fecal culture which you must have to live.
It just science bro.
My students ask well how do we originally get our gut ,skin and mucous membrane bacterial cultured which we need to survive?
Your mother passed it to you at birth and inside the womb. At birth you come out right next too and usually with fecal matter children of C sections must be given first milk by their mother or they also risk not having a healthy immune system. 75% of your immune system is your gut track symbiotic relationship with trillions of bacteria that your mother gave you a start with.
So yes you are something like correct. I just don't see the point in creating an industry that's unnecessary. Kinda like bottled water and Kuerig coffee pods. Stupid.
The best starter culture for lactobacillus is one oak leaf in the fermentation vessel. The little buggers that love the oak tree leaves are of a species that offers a more crisp and robust end productive, never becoming soft or mushy. I have no idea how, but my chemical engineer wife says it's the unique tannins in the oak leaf.
“You vill eat the bug yogurt and you will be happy” - Klaus Schwab ( from the supervillain’s retirement home)
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