The foodtech will use yeast as hosts to initially produce casein and whey protein, two of the main proteins found in milk.
Bioreacted casein would be a HUGE leap for cow-free dairy. I remember when Perfect Day started up they were having too much trouble producing casein, so their products couldn’t be used to make stringy or melty cheese.
As a former cheese addict who developed severe lactose intolerance, I’ll just be waiting here for the synthetic cheese. (Please. I miss pain-free cheese so much 😭)
My wife has an anaphylactic allergy to whey. I guess we’ll now be waiting for the day she has a reaction to “vegan” milk.
😬 now that’s a rough time. Perfect Day does disclaim milk allergenic on their website but I have no idea if they require their clients to include that on their consumer product packaging.
If it takes off it might still make it harder to find a decent dairy alternative for people with this kind of allergy.
this is why at the end of the day I hope we invent Star Trek replicators
and allergy cures
Why not eat lactose free cheese?
Certain cheese (mainly hard cheese) is theoretically zero lactose due to fermentation using it up, but I find that even most hard cheeses give me a reaction.
I have a history of psychosomatic reactions to food, though. For example I couldn’t eat beef, chicken, or pork for years after several food poisoning incidents in quick succession. Even though I knew the reaction was all in my head, the physical effects still happened. Super frustrating.
However I have had 2 incidents where I had GI symptoms occur after eating something containing dairy where I didn’t know until I looked at the ingredients list, so I know it’s not 100% in my head.
To my fellow LI sufferers I encourage you to experiment with hard cheeses, as there’s plenty of people who have documented their success with those! :)
(Just do it on a day where you have a bathroom always available, lol.)
I’m not talking about hard cheese but cheese that specifically says “lactose free” in the packaging
Never actually seen any besides the cream cheese at Trader Joe’s. Going to keep an eye out now
I’ve tried two varieties of biotech milk, both had a mouthfeel almost identical to normal milk. Unfortunately, both of the varieties I’ve tried have used sunflower seed oil for the fat and that gives the end product a noticeable raw sunflower seed flavor/bitterness which isn’t very pleasant.
Surprising (and frustrating) that they didn’t use a properly deodorized grade of oil. Do you mind sharing which products you tried? I’m curious
I don’t recall the first one (I tried it sometime late last year) but the more recent one was from Tomorrow farms. Now that I think about it, I suppose there’s a possibility they both were from the same company with different branding.
The good news is that the bitter sunflower flavor can be drowned out pretty handily using chocolate syrup (and as I mentioned it’s texture is spot on), so despite my dissatisfaction with the milk on it’s own, it makes a great chocolate milk.
Fermentation-made milk substitute was available at supermarkets in Singapore (under the brand name Very Dairy, though the original product was from the startup Perfect Day). I really liked it—a lot nicer than oat milk for drinking straight up. Unfortunately it went off the shelves after a while, seems like demand wasn’t high :-(
This would be cool now I just need some good no animal version of a fat cap and gristle
