Quorn Fermentation and Evolution in Fermenters | Hacker News Reader

Quorn Fermentation and Evolution in Fermenters

davidmoore.org.uk

47 pointsmatthewmorgan33 comments

My daughter went vegetarian 8 years ago (aged 15) and we discovered Quorn products soon after. We regularly make a Quorn bolognese sauce for pasta, and she loves the Quorn herb and garlic chicken fillets. The latter are remarkably accurate and both her sister and boyfriend who are not vegetarian love the flavour and texture. I agree with the poster that commented wondering why Quorn isn't more well known and mycoprotein more popular. It seems like a more well established and faster path to faux-meat protein substitute at scale that could be acceptable to dedicated carnivores.

What country are you in by the way? Here in the UK Quorn is ubiquitous and has always been considered the "boring option" of vegetarian food.

The discussion here always seems to be how much vegetarian/vegan options have improved in recent years and aren't just the same quorn/linda mccartney options all the time

I seem to recall there was some regulatory thing in the US that affected them? Possibly similar to the "you can't call Oat Milk, Milk" thing.

edit:

> After Quorn's 2002 debut in the United States, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) disputed the original labeling of Quorn as a "mushroom based" product, since Fusarium venenatum is not a mushroom (rather, it is a microfungus).[42]

We’re in Australia. It may well have been around for well before I saw it but then I wasn’t looking out for those options.

I believe Quorn fillets and many soy-protein products have got an undeserved bad reputation because people have cooked them wrong. If you fry them straight up in a pan, like you would meat, it is too easy to get a result that is too dry.

A better way is often to simmer in water or broth to heat them through, followed by a quick singe in a pan (Maillard reaction) or a toss in butter.

I think they're not as well-known, and there's increasing amounts of competition. I wish some restaurants would pick them up as chicken substitutes like they've done for Beyond and Impossible. The KFC Beyond chicken sucks

I think it's used in the KFC veggie chicken burgers, and tastes just fine, actually maybe better than their chicken.

I don't understand why mycoprotein is not much more popular, I think only one company makes products currently?.

And it seems like the kind of thing dedicated home fermentation enthusiasts might be able to try. I'd love to grow my own Quorn-like food.

I don't understand why mycoprotein is not much more popular, I think only one company makes products currently?

In addition to Quorn, I've been meaning to try Meati some time: https://meati.com

Another new contender (I just picked up a package, haven't cooked it yet) is Fynd:

https://www.naturesfynd.com/

A third company is https://myforestfoods.com/ formerly At Last foods.

They are doing mushroom based bacon, there's a kind of cool, kind of unsettling picture here of one of the fungus slabs. I'm curious to try it if my friend group ever overlaps with with where they're selling in a convenient way.

https://www.timesunion.com/business/article/Albany-company-m...

Good luck to them, bacon has to be one of the more challenging foods to attempt. Theirs looks decidedly overcooked to me, but it does look tasty.

For me, as an ex vegetarian, the issue is that Quorn just doesn't taste that nice. It's fairly bland, and what little flavour it has isn't very interesting.

It really needs to be dressed up to make it worth having in a meal, but even in something like a curry, I don't enjoy eating it as much as chicken

When talking about burgers, IMHO a well-made Portobello mushroom burger blows all other types of vegetarian burgers out of the water. It's its own thing, not trying to imitate meat. They are common at higher-end burger restaurants in the UK — which has many vegans and vegetarians.

But it would need to be cooked properly to be tasty: marinated beforehand and fried for a proper amount of time to drive off moisture and develop umami. And because of that you'll never find them at fast-food places.

I'll have to give this a try. I've blown it off previously as just being a mushroom in a bun.

I ask three things of a meat substitute: Taste vaguely like meat, have macronutrients vaguely like meat, and be significantly cheaper than meat.

No child knows or cares what goes into Chicken Fingers, but their parents sure care when the price doubles. What does Quorn need to compete with existing heavily subsidized processes in US agribusiness that have a much larger ethical footprint and which are supposedly less efficient at producing protein?

It is an interesting question. It is clear that some of these these alternatives can stand on fairly similar price points without subsidies - other more newer players, not so much. I'm thinking things like Beyond meat that simply do not have a price advantage in any fashion.

It really does feel like the only way to make a dint is to either wait for prices to raise so much that even the subsidies don't save the industry or they just remove the subsidies altogether. I suspect the latter is not likely anytime soon.

It's pretty interesting - if you talk to a lifelong vegetarian, they have very little interest in the various meat substitutes. The taste and texture and nutrients of a balanced vegetarian diet are sufficient; why go through the extra trouble to make the food taste like something it isn't?

I expect that we'll gradually adjust to eating less meat and enjoying more vegetables, without resorting to made-in-a-factory meat substitutes. That scenario seems much healthier than some sort of fungus-meat-analogue dystopia, personally.

I noticed this was very different in different cultures. For example, when I went to Singapore, there was lots of Chinese vegetarian food and lots of Indian vegetarian food. The Chinese vegetarian food almost always used mock meat, while the Indian vegetarian food never did.

Personally, as a vegetarian for over three decades, I have sometimes been grossed out by realistic meat substitutes, but sometimes found them palatable and even appealing. Just a few days ago I ate a mock meat sandwich from The Butcher's Son in Berkeley that I enjoyed quite a bit (even though it's not very similar to anything I would normally eat most of the time).

I suspect this question is pretty complicated and varies a lot from place to place, person to person, and time to time. For instance, it might be different for people who associated meat with celebrations and feasts and then gave it up somewhat reluctantly, and for people who found meat unpleasant and unappetizing and always preferred eating other things. These two people would naturally have different cultural and emotional associations to the act of eating (something that seems quite a lot like) meat.

So I'd encourage people working in the vegetarian food industry to pursue both tracks: make mock meats that are more and more realistic, and also show people that things that are not very meat-like at all can be appealing and interesting to eat.

Ymmv, but as a lifelong flexitarian, meat substitutes help me adapt recipes I encounter in the wild. Just as there are nonvegetarians that enjoy new tastes and food and nonvegetarians that stick to what's vanilla, so too you can encounter diversity among vegetarians.

Besides, meat substitutes have a long tradition; where I live, mock meat has been in Buddhist cuisine and this has been a tradition prior to the Western trends towards vegetarianism.

Speaking as a veggie...

> why go through the extra trouble to make the food taste like something it isn't?

...because meat tastes a lot better is why, and is often more protein-, fat- and calorie-dense. Vegetables are pretty boring to me at least.

> fungus-meat-analogue dystopia

Branding a meat substitute as 'dystopian' makes your comment idiotic.

It depends massively on the person. I was vegetarian from birth to age 16, it was during this time that Quorn was launched in the UK. I loved it. It was a lot nicer than the other meat substitutes we had available in the 80s/90s. It was a lot more expensive though, so it was only ever a treat. In retrospect it was probably only a similar price to meat, but we didn't have much money. Conversely my wife has been vegetarian since she was a young child and can't stand any meat substitutes.

Which only applies if entire countries become 100% vegetarian, but that's never going to happen. At best we can massively reduce our meat (especially beef) intake, but eating meat is so ingrained in western culture that it's never going to fully go away

As a veggie I love this stuff.

Despite all the new meat replacements coming out, I still prefer Quorn pieces to most of them.

Something one would not glean from this (fascinating) technical paper: it is absolutely delicious.

It is fascinating seeing folks flocking to these new meat alternatives not knowing about the neat stuff that had already been produced decades before.

Here in Australia - I still think the crown champion is the Not Burger by Veggie Delights. Discovered them in 2006 and I have yet to come across anything as good.

https://vegiedelights.com.au/products/classic-not-burger/

It isn't trying to imitate meat - it is just down right delicious.

This is fascinating! I’ve enjoyed Quorn stuff for years and I never really thought about the production process.

It would be super cool if this process were to result in a protein that’s significantly cheaper than meat.

Quorn is a very interesting piece of sociological/science history. People were deadly serious about the risk of food shortage. What that led to included the 1 child policy in china, and the Indian emergency (forced sterilisations) in the 1970s which wreaked immense harm on society at large, and probably the economies of both countries long-term.

The Quorn engineers did amazingly well. A small minority cohort of consumers showed them it can cause mushroom-sensitive/intolerant people a bit of harm and so it got a "not safe" label which is a shame. If they'd managed that better we might well have achieved a remarkable shift in protein source efficiency worldwide.

You can put C.M.Kornbluth and Fred Pohl's "Space Merchants" and Isaac Asimov's "zymoveal" in his "The Caves of Steel" as well as the "Soylent Green" in "Make Room Make Room" by Harry Harrison into this box: the zeitgeist was very definitely "we are heading to a world with more people than we can produce protein for" view. As late as 1981, Alasdair Gray's "Lanark: A novel" has the idea that desperate times cause desperate protein measures.

As it turns out. we're going to peak at 11b. the corner in rate of growth (2nd order differential?) is pretty clear now.

Quorn was patented. They expired in 2010 (according to the very fine article)

Rank Hovis McDougall food scientists really ought to be known better. Amazing work. When you think about prior science in bio-reactors at scale, you go back to WW1 and the acetone production by Weitzmann which solved the explosives shortage, and relates to the post WW1 Palestine/Israel decisions, and to Penicillin: (WW2, unrelated) which was being made in the UK in of all things, china bedpans, before the Americans worked out a flow process in bioreactors at scale.

Weitzmann is famous for a science quote which is something along the lines of "I have only so far made 1 litre. But in principle if I can get this to work I can scale it to 100 Tonnes or more, per production cycle"

Edit: here's the quote:

Weizmann told Churchill: “So far I have succeeded in making a few hundred cubic centimeters of acetone at a time by the fermentation process. I do my work in a laboratory. I am not a technician. I am only a research chemist,” said Weizmann.

Weizmann continued: “But, if I were somehow able to produce a ton of acetone, I would be able to multiply that by any factor you choose. Once the bacteriology of the process is established, it is only a question of brewing. I must get hold of a brewing engineer from one of the big distilleries, and we will set about the preliminary task.”

https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest...

I used to eat Quorn in the 90's, then had to cut back on sodium for health reasons. Quorn has a ridiculously high amount of sodium added to it.

Which is why it tastes so good! Shame really.

Like restaurant vegetables - taste great but the secret is a ton of salt and sugar.

I disagree strongly with you on the "secret" to vegetables.

They have lots of salt/fat, because unless it is a puree of some sort, or a vegetarian/vegan restaurants, (places with a chef that is attentive), veggies are treated as a side no one wants to eat and are usually tossed in the trash by the busing staff. Which is why you often see frozen, canned, or the lowest quality presented slathered in salt/fat: the real taste has been obliterated by processing.

The problem is they are trucked great distances so are harvested too early (since they are more robust when unripe). I've had local butter lettuce that tasted sweet and firm, and tomatoes and carrots that tasted like candy. But I'm lucky to live near a lot of local agriculture grown with intention (Portland).

It's a bummer that every city/town in the US doesn't have local produce of some sort.

That is a fair analysis of the situation. Producing better produce is the better path forwards and it is where we should be going. But in taking short cuts there are the four horsemen of flavor - Salt, Fats, Carbs and Sugar. A little is good, too much is bad.

As for fresh produce, I used to work in food manufacturing and there was company pitching their new sterile, vacuum packed fruit range. The idea was that the fruit would be ripened and sealed up at the farm. Their pitch was "fresher than fresh". The idea was that they could stop the ripening process in a fashion similar to how NASA stores their produce for long hauls. Overall it was... ok but there is a reason why it never really went anywhere.

I wonder if this stuff can at all be made at home (and prepared), or if this mostly just makes any sense in a factory setting.

You can cultivate "chicken of the woods" fungus on certain wood mediums. This has decent flavor texture and protein content. It's a little fickle to cultivate and getting spores or plugs may be tricky. But this is probably your best bet at growing something similar to Quorn without a proper lab space.

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