Banana-y bread and onion beer: How yeast can trick our tastebuds | Artificial intelligence
Maker of beer, bread and wine, yeast is our biggest microbial friend. Now we’re engineering weird new flavours with it – even lager that tastes of something
FLORIAN BAUER’S recipe doesn’t sound very wine-like. Take water, sugar, some amino acids and yeast, and let it ferment. And yet… “When you smell it you say, ‘yes, that’s wine!’,” says Bauer, a wine scientist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.
Most people would casually assume that a wine’s nose is all about the grapes, just as a beer’s flavour is all in the hops and barley. Not so. Much of the taste of these beverages comes from an organism too small to see with the naked eye. From a sugar-loving fungus, to be precise, one we use to produce not just wine, beer and sake, but also bread, some of our most toothsome cheeses and more.
Unwittingly at first, we have been domesticating and breeding this single-celled organism for millennia. The resulting legion of faithful servants can claim, arguably more than any dog, to be humanity’s best friend.
We’re talking about yeast – or more precisely Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or brewer’s or baker’s yeast. But while yeast’s fermentative properties are well known, we are only now getting to grips with just how much it contributes to flavour. As researchers prise open its secrets, they are finding new and sometimes truly weird ways to tickle tipplers’ and gourmands’ taste buds. Beer like banana milkshake? Bread with a truly nutty crunch? With yeast, everything is possible. “In terms of flavour, you can go as far as your mind can take you,” says Jan Steensels, a molecular biologist at the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) in Belgium.
We have been fermenting stuff for thousands of years, but most …