What makes lab-grown meat taste more like the real thing?

A team of researchers at Yonsei University in Korea has developed "lab-grown meat" that releases "enhanced flavour" when heated, mimicking the flavour of real meat.

Scientists around the world are developing “cultured” or lab-grown meat as an alternative to real animal meat, where a sample of a cell from a living animal is taken and grown in a lab to form a lump of meat, using fewer resources and less space.

However, there are doubts that the original cell sample perfectly mimics the flavour of real meat when grown in the lab.

"That's not the case," study author Millai Li, from Yonsei University, told MailOnline. "The cell culture doesn't produce the same product as conventional meat, so it's not that simple. We tried to focus on the flavours of cultured meat in this study, because we thought that this property was essential to identifying cultured meat as a real food."

The research team explained that the real meat flavour comes from the "Maillard" chemical reaction between amino acids and sugars in the meat, which occurs at a temperature of about 150 degrees Celsius.

But the problem with lab-grown meat is that it lacks amino acids compared to real meat, which means the Maillard reaction doesn't happen as strongly.

Specifically, the researchers identified a compound called furfuryl mercaptan, which is produced by the Maillard reaction during cooking of beef and chicken.

So, the researchers created a “switchable flavour compound” (SFC) that maintains flavour at normal temperatures, but when heated releases a burst of flavour at 150°C, mimicking the Maillard reaction in animal meat.

Previous research has used similar methods to develop lab-grown meat, which has the same shape as traditional products like steaks and meatballs, but the actual flavour is often overlooked, the researchers say.

Although the newly developed bizarre pink slice doesn't look like real beef, the research team's next task is to mimic the appearance of real meat.

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.