Novel Ferments: Alternative Starter Cultures

Two presentations at the Stanford Fermented Food Conference described experiments that prove food and beverages can be fermented without a conventional starter culture. They showed that ants and bees, when mixed with milk and tea, created yogurt and kombucha. I’ve added a third report that was not discussed at the conference, but proves yogurt can be made from far more, ahem, “personal” sources.

Ants in my pants

Veronica Sinotte from the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Biosustainability presented research undertaken by Sevgi Mutlu Sirakova, who studied traditional fermentation practices in her home countries of Bulgaria and Turkey.

The paper Making yogurt with the ant holobiont uncovers bacteria, acids, and enzymes for food fermentation was authored by Sirikova, Sinotte, David Zilber, and others. It is a report of a study investigating the traditional use of red wood ants (Formica rufa group) to initiate yogurt fermentation, a practice with ethnographic roots in Turkey and Bulgaria. The research validates the central hypothesis that the “ant holobiont”—the ant and its associated microbial community—collectively acts as a catalyst to fermentation. Live ants contribute a stable and desirable microbiome, dominated by lactic acid and acetic acid bacteria, to the milk.

In other words, take a jar of milk, add a couple of live ants, bury it in the garden for a day, and Hey Presto! Yogurt. No other starter needed.

How come?

Insect-inside

The live ants contribute essential bacteria, acids (formic, lactic, and acetic), and enzymes (proteases and peptidases) to the milk, facilitating the fermentation process and influencing the resulting yogurt’s flavor and texture. The paper suggests that examining traditional food practices through a “holobiont” lens can reveal novel microbial origins and applications for fermented foods, thereby challenging conventional understandings of fermentation starters.

It has also been suggested that the wine yeasts can originate from social wasps, where the symbiosis between wasps and yeasts is essential for the microbial transfer to wine ecosystems. Wasps pierce the skin of grapes and transfer natural yeasts, overwintered in their gut, to the broken grapes, thereby maintaining the ecological diversity of grape’s microbiota and facilitating the spontaneous grape fermentation process.

The Turkish practice of adding live ants to milk has shown that fermentation not only began, but continues, outside of a reliable supply of starter, and that:

These interspecies relationships are reflected in the Turkish word for a fermentation starter, maya, that ultimately “comes from relations within the broader web of life”, including microbes, animals, plants, and human culture.

And it goes back a long way. Prehistoric dairy fermentation potentially occurred as early as 7,000 years ago, based on residues found in ancient pottery cheese strainers. Indeed, F. sanfranciscensis (the lactic acid bacteria named after the famed San Francisco sourdough bread) probably evolved in ants over millions of years and was only introduced into fermented foods with the advent of bread making in the last several thousand years—something to remember when you next visit Fisherman’s Wharf.

If the nomads want to make yogurt and cannot find enough starter culture, they crush the tiny eggs of the ants sheltering under the stones in their palms. When you put this into the milk, that milk becomes yogurt. In neighboring Bulgaria, a traditional spring practice involves fermenting yogurt within a red wood ant colony.

Chefs at the Michelin-starred Alchemist in Copenhagen created three experimental ant-based dishes.

Ant-wich Ice Cream Sandwich (D)

The “ant-wich” consisted of ant yogurt ice cream, ant gel filling, and ant tuile. Live ants were crushed and mixed with milk, the ice cream and wafer were then served in the shape of an ant using a laser-cut stencil.

Goat Milk “Mascarpone” (E)

A mascarpone-like cheese was developed using ants as the coagulant. In common practice, lemon juice and milk or cream are added to make mascarpone, where the citric acid coagulates the dairy. Here, the acid from the ants likely contributed to the coagulation.

Milk Wash Cocktail (F)

Milk-wash is a technique commonly used in cocktails to clarify a liquid. Milk Punch, a drink prepared with this technique, is a dairy-based drink dating to the late 1600s and early 1700s. Here, the milk coagulation was induced with dehydrated ants. The mixture was filtered through a coffee filter, and the cocktail was garnished with four frozen ants.

The authors of the paper are excited by this.

Beyond the possibility of imagining new foods, exposing the public to familiar foods made with microbes and insects could conceivably help change consumer perceptions of entomophagy [the practice of eating insects]. From the food science perspective, microbes or enzymes from ant yogurts can be integrated into the food system to explore novel applications and flavours. For example, these ant microbes hold potential promise for new plant-based foods, such as dairy-free yogurts.

The origins of kombucha

As mentioned in a previous post, Josh Evans‘ presentation on ‘novel ferments’ detailed a project he led where astronauts fermented miso on the International Space Station. He also described the work of his colleague Kim Wejendorp, R&D chef at the Sustainable Food Innovation Group. Kim experiments with microbial foods, casein alternatives, and new food-grade fermentation technologies. Significantly, one of his tests succeeded in fermenting kombucha without any SCOBY starter using a mix of ingredients.

He combined a sunflower and some dead honeybees from the garden with some of his own skin microbiomes, and mixed it together in sweetened green tea. And lo and behold, a pellicle started to form. He transferred that to some new sweetened green tea. And after a couple of batches, he had a drink that bubbled, acidified, and smelled and tasted like kombucha.

This solves the ‘chicken and egg’ problem of how kombucha was first created (in 221BC China?) without any starter to back-slop into a new batch.

This tastes like my…

When GOOP introduced Gwyneth Paltrow’s infamous candle, it led to endless jokes on late-night television. On a more serious note, women have been experimenting with ferments created from their juices.

Cecilia Westbrook, an MD/PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, wondered why there was nothing on Google about cooking with vaginal juices. Westbrook knew the most common bacteria in a healthy vagina is lactobacillus–the same bacteria found in yogurt, cheese, and dairy products. So she set out to make yogurt.

She first harvested healthy vaginal fluid using a wooden spoon. In a control group, she used real yogurt as a starter. In a negative control group she just used plain milk as a starter. For the third group, she used vaginal fluid as a starter.

Westbrook left the mixtures to stand overnight.

Fast forward to the next morning. Westbrook did the taste test. She described the vaginal yogurt as “sour, fresh and tingled a bit on the tongue.” She said “it reminded her of Indian yogurt and they ate it with blueberries.

— Med Student Makes Yogurt Using Her Own Vaginal Bacteria, CBS News, Feb 11, 2015

Not to be outdone, later that same year, Women’s Health reported Feminist Bakes Sourdough Bread Using Her Own Vaginal Yeast. Blogger Zoe Stavri was inspired to experiment when she suffered a yeast infection. The article goes into explicit detail about the process:

Waking up on Saturday with the familiar itchy burny fanny, I giggled to myself, ‘Maybe I could make bread with that,’ and that ticked into, ‘Well, I’ve always wanted to try making my own sourdough anyway,’ and then a ‘Fuck, would that even work?’ And then I got curious, and the next thing that happened was I was scraping white goop off of a dildo into a bowl of flour mixed with water.

When she posted her sourdough starter recipe online, there was what she termed ‘a blatant misogynistic backlash’ that she forcefully rebuts.

Zoe contends that, really, yeast is yeast. And yeast from her vagina is no less gross than any of the other yeast we use to bake bread with. “Making sourdough starter entails encouraging stuff that’s present in the flour and just sort of floating around in the air in your kitchen and on your utensils to grow,” she writes. “That’s what wild yeast is. … Like all bread made with yeast, once it’s cooked, it’s not exactly going to go about colonizing your gut with yeast. The biggest risk with using candida albicans for bread making is that it won’t rise.”

Disclaimer

The information in this post is provided for informational purposes only, and readers should verify the accuracy by checking the source literature. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of this publication.