新西兰食品学家研制出牛肉巧克力

Red meat hardly seems like the perfect ingredient for delicious chocolate, but a New Zealand-based food scientist is willing to bet that his high-protein, 50% beef chocolate recipe is going to be a hit.

 

红色肉类似乎不可能是美味巧克力的完美配方，但是新西兰的一位食品学家认为他研制出的高蛋白、含50%牛肉的巧克力将受到欢迎。

 

Mustafa Farouk, Senior Food Technologist at Ag Research has partnered with Auckland boutique chocolate maker Devonport Chocolates to bring meat chocolate to the masses. The quirky idea of combining the two very different ingredients came to Dr. Farouk one day, while looking at ways of adding value to beef and pondering ways the staple food might be consumed in the future. Mixing beef and chocolate seemed like the perfect way for people to get proteins and other nutrients in meat, because chocolate is such a popular dessert.

 

So Farouk took a very lean cut from the hind quarter of a Waikato-raised bovine, turned into what he calls "chocolate butter", which I assume is a sort of fine paste, and handed it over to Devonport Chocolates to use in their confectionery. The resulting combination reportedly has a consistency similar to a Turkish delight, and while the food scientist admits you can tell that it's not regular chocolate, the taste of meat is almost impossible to pick up. In an interview with the New Zealand Herald, Farouk described the taste of beef chocolate as "wonderful", adding that although people are initially put off by the unique dessert when they here it is 50% beef, once they bite into it and taste the rich chocolate flavor, most agree that it is excellent.

 

"We knew we could turn meat into different forms, but whether we could actually fool people by making it look like chocolate is what we didn’t know," Dr. Farouk said. "When you try it now, you don't know what you're eating." He adds that it's very easy to change the texture of beef chocolate from very smooth to a dessert that has some body, fiber to it, but from whatever feedback they have released so far, the smooth one is tastier.