A veggie burger out of the printer

Researchers at WUR have developed a process for printing a vegetarian burger. The burger is made up of spaghetti-like threads of protein.

In the process hall of the Axis campus building stands a Burger Extrusion Printer (BEP), one of the first of its kind in the world. This fulfils the wish of an anonymous donor who gave WUR one million euros to develop the machine nearly two years ago. The generous donor’s assignment was clear: design a 3D printer that can make a meat substitute out of plant protein.

Project leader Laurice Pouvreau: “We have made progress insofar as we can make fibrous structures from plant based material with a 3D printer. And from these fibrous structures we can make threads with which shapes can be printed.” And it has really been used to print a burger. A proposal for a follow-up is waiting for the green light. Pouvreau believes there is every reason to take the project further.

Approach

Pouvreau explains that the basic steps are comparable with techniques such as extrusion and shear cell technology (a process from Wageningen) for making fibrous structures from vegetable protein. It is a combination of heating and cooling. You have to heat the material to unfold the proteins and create the fibrous structure. Then you have to cool it down to fixate that structure. What has been fine-tuned is the time the material spends being heated and cooled, which is less than a minute in this process. That is very short compared to an extruder (three to five minutes) or a shear cell (up to 20 minutes). So far, the printer has mainly been working with bean protein ingredients.

Taste 

As far as flavour is concerned, the printing process has a surprise up its sleeve. What comes out of the printer turned out to taste a lot better than expected. Beans that come out of an extruder do not taste very nice, without addition of flavour. Post-processing is needed to make palatable meat alternatives. With this printer, that is not necessary; you don’t get much of a beany taste.

Intermediate step

It is this last development in particular that Pouvreau and her colleagues are keen to research further with new funding. And as far as she is concerned, the development should not stop with vegetarian burgers that imitate meat. “Actually, I want to get away from the idea that the end product must taste like meat. Veggie burgers are an intermediate step: they look like something the consumer is familiar with.”

Biefstuk Bali 0.0

WUR was not the first past the post, though. That was the Israeli company Redefine Meat, which made a splash with the first cuts of printed meat last year. Recently, their product has been on the menu at several branches of the Dutch restaurant chain Loetje (including Arnhem) under the name Biefstuk Bali 0.0.

Resource-online.nl

Beeld: Eric Scholten