Would you like to follow a more plant-based diet but don’t think that the plant burger is quite as exciting as the traditional beef burger?

Researchers from Aarhus University are working to make the green choice a delicious choice.

Together with a number of European companies and research institutions, they are currently studying what a plant-based product should contain to create a burger that is as juicy as possible.

The project is funded by EIT Food, which is supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union.

Hanne Christine Bertram, Professor at the Department of Food Science, is leading the project activities that takes place at Aarhus University:

- The juiciness of food is important to consumers. Next to flavour and texture, juiciness is the most important sensory attribute, so this needs to be prioritized to encourage us to replace traditional meat products with plant-based products.

Therefore, together with a number of other meat experts, she is transferring her vast knowledge of the juiciness of animal products to the plant-based area - and it is still pioneering work.

- We simply do not know enough about these products yet, she emphasizes.

New toolkit to help food companies

The juiciness of meat is defined as the impression of moisture and lubrication when meat is chewed in the mouth.

It comes from two sources: the juice, consisting of water and fat, which is released during chewing, and the amount of saliva it generates - and this makes juiciness a complex trait.

This project is developing an experimental toolbox, which will make it easier to understand the juiciness of plant protein-based meat alternatives - and this will enable us to link juiciness to specific ingredients, product structure and processing. 

- We have worked for many years to understand water compartmentalization in meat, how the water interacts with other components of the meat, and finally how it affects the juiciness, and now we are in the process of creating knowledge in the field of plant-based alternatives. In the project, we vary many factors to examine what these individually do to our product, says Hanne Christine Bertram.

The researchers have made plant-based meat with different fat sources in the form of coconut oil, sunflower oil and rapeseed oil, and then they have varied the processesing of plant proteins, so the plant ingredients have different particle sizes - and thus structure and texture.

A wealth of laboratory and sensory studies

The project partners examine many different factors and products in a number of ways.

At Aarhus University, the water distribution of many different plant-based products is in focus:

- Using low-field NMR, we can investigate the interactions between the products' ingredients, the proteins, and the water - and thus see how they behave together. We examine both raw and cooked products, because it is an incredibly important property for the products to be able to hold on to the liquid during the heat treatment that takes place during preparation, says Hanne Christine Bertram.

Aarhus University also conducts important sensory evaluations with a trained sensory panel, and this result is compared with data from the various laboratory examinations.

- It is an iterative process where we learn from our research, produce new prototypes, which we investigate, and which lead to new knowledge and new prototypes and new research, so here in the second year of the project we are still a long way from the goal, concludes Hanne Christine Bertram.