 |
| Photo Credit: Marat Gilyadzinov |
Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) have discovered that jellyfish can be used as a food stabiliser. In the future, the slimy creatures may become an important ingredient in a more sustainable food production system.
Food stabiliser.
The word might not sound particularly appetizing, but without food stabilizers, much of the food we eat would be impossible to make. It would not be able to retain its consistency or form but would split or spread out.
Nature itself has created many stabilizers to maintain the structure of organisms, and over time, we humans have learned to use them in our food.
The most well-known example in the home kitchen is egg yolk, which allows mayonnaise to bind together. In the industrial food sector, stabilizers are even more crucial. Here, ingredients such as starch, pectin, gelatine, and algal stabilizers are used to achieve the right consistency in everything from ketchup to chocolate milk.
Now, in a new peer-reviewed study, researchers from the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) have discovered that jellyfish can also be used as a natural and potentially sustainable food stabilizer.
- Jellyfish consist of approximately 1% biological material. The rest is water. So, you could say that, evolutionarily speaking, they are perfectly tuned to hold a liquid together. This can be useful in the kitchen, says Mie Thorborg Pedersen, postdoc at SDU Food Matter and lead author of the study.
Jellyfish as a problem
Jellyfish have proven to be usable for multiple stabilizing purposes. They can emulsify, for example, to make mayonnaise, but also to create foams and gelled oils, which is essentially a type of butter.
This could make them interesting for the food industry, which is seeking to move away from traditional animal-based products, but potentially also for sectors such as cosmetics or pharmaceuticals, the researcher explains.
- Of course, jellyfish are animals too, so it can’t be classified as plant-based. But jellyfish can present quite a serious problem in our waters, where they can put additional pressure on already stressed fish stocks and ecological balances. And with climate change, the number of jellyfish is expected to increase, says Mie Thorborg Pedersen.
- In Asia, jellyfish have been eaten for a long time, and some trials have begun in Europe, but in Denmark, jellyfish are still an untapped resource. They are somewhat overlooked, so we still need to explore what possibilities they offer. Perhaps jellyfish hold the key to how we can create structure in the food of the future.
Collaboration with top restaurant
In the new study, the researchers took a simpler approach than is often the case. They used whole jellyfish, freeze-dried them into a white powder, both with and without their natural salt, and then used the powder to make mayonnaise, foam and oil.
This means the marine flavor of the jellyfish is carried into the food products.
- Normally, one might attempt to isolate the specific molecules that give jellyfish their stabilizing properties to create a flavor-neutral stabilizer and a pure product. But we have a hypothesis that in doing so, functionality would be diminished. That’s something we want to understand more about in the future, says Mie Thorborg Pedersen.
- The interesting thing is that jellyfish, with very minimal processing, show excellent properties in terms of foaming, emulsifying and gelling oils. In some respects, they perform far better than what we see from purified plant proteins, says Mie Thorborg Pedersen.
The researchers will therefore continue to investigate the potential of using the whole jellyfish as a stabilizer, along with the marine flavor it imparts — for example, in jellyfish mayonnaise. They are doing so in collaboration with the chefs and researchers at Spora, the research kitchen of the restaurant Alchemist in Copenhagen, which is ranked as the fifth best in the world.
About the study: Researchers from the Department of Green Technology at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) have examined whether freeze-dried jellyfish can be used as a natural stabiliser in food.
This is the first study to show that jellyfish can be used directly as a multifunctional food ingredient for emulsions, foams, and oil gels. SDU has applied for a patent on the technology.
The researchers produced two types of powder: one containing the jellyfish’s natural salts and another where the salts were removed. The desalted powder created the most stable emulsions with small, uniform oil droplets and no liquid separation, especially at low pH. The high-salt powder created less stable emulsions but instead developed an elastic network that made it possible to transform the emulsion into a firm oil gel as the water evaporated.
Published in journal: Food Hydrocolloids
Title: Multi-functional food structuring ingredients from jellyfish
Authors: Mie T. Pedersen, MatÃas A. Via, Paul Kempen, Thomas A. Vilgis, and Mathias P. Clausen
Source/Credit: University of Southern Denmark | Sebastian Wittrock
Reference Number: btech120825_01
.jpg)
