Baking bread and making chocolate with fermentation

The Vrije Universiteit Brussel has started brewing beer, baking bread and making chocolate, three key pillars of a major fermentation pilot project. The brand-new microbrewery, microbakery and microchocolatery are now operational. 

"We will brew, bake and make chocolate under the banner of the Fermented Food Pilot Plant," says initiator Luc De Vuyst. "The aim is to better map the impact of microbiological fermentation processes for the production of sour beers, sourdough bread and cocoa and to better understand their influence on flavour formation." 

In practice

"In the microbakery, we can put our scientific discoveries and accumulated expertise on sourdough into practice," says De Vuyst. "Moreover, our bakery infrastructure will be available for contract research for industry, where we can work with SMEs and large companies to fine-tune and describe their specific fermentation processes under controlled conditions in a near-lab environment and with sufficient scale as a function of the breads and other bakery products produced. This will be done in cooperation with the Flanders' FOOD spearhead cluster."

The chocolate adventure also revolves entirely around fermentation. "We now have a very well-equipped chocolate production line that allows us to investigate and describe the effects of the fermentation of cocoa beans - spontaneous or started with starter cultures - on the final chocolate," says De Vuyst.

Those fermentations the VUB researchers carry out themselves in the jungles of Costa Rica and Ecuador, among others. "We then ship those fermented dry beans to the campus in Brussels where we turn them into chocolate," says De Vuyst. "We want to investigate what it takes in terms of fermentation to make the very best chocolate."

Continuous monitoring

The third pillar of the fermentation pilot project is the microbrewery. De Vuyst: We want to make a sour beer with a mixture of yeast, lactic acid bacteria and acetic acid bacteria, but one that does not need to be in wooden barrels. We don't know yet whether that will work. In any case, the aim is to launch different, innovative beers."

The first finished products from the microbakery, microbrewery and microchocolatery are expected in just a few weeks' time.

Vub.be