The perfect steak? Researchers create lab-grown meat with better taste and bespoke marbling

HAMILTON, Ontario – Usually when you go to a steakhouse, the waiter asks you how you want your meat to be cooked. Researchers at McMaster University say they may soon be asking you how you’d like your steak to be “settled.” The team has developed a new form of lab-grown meat that they say tastes and feels more natural than other alternative meats.

Not only does their creation give more of that “real meat” experience, but the study reveals that this new approach also allows the eater to have the exact amount of fat and marbling they want in that cut of “meat”. particular.

“We are creating slices of meat,” says researcher Ravi Selvaganapathy in a press release. “Consumers will be able to buy meat with the percentage of fat of their choice, just as they do with milk.”

How exactly does lab meat work?

Selvaganapathy and Alireza Shahin-Shamsabadi, both from McMaster School of Biomedical Engineering, have devised a way to create lab meat by stacking thin sheets of grown muscle and fat cells together. This technique is a new version of the method used by scientists to cultivate tissue intended for human transplants.

These sheets of living cells are about as thin as a sheet of printer paper. They are first grown in a laboratory culture and then concentrated on growth plates. From there, the researchers will peel them off and stack them all together. Selvaganapathy says these leaves naturally bind to each other before the cells start to die.

The team says their tuning process also gives their meat substitute an edge over other products.

“ Felt and tasted like meat ”

The researchers tested their meat-making process using mouse cells. While they didn’t actually cook and taste “mouse meat,” the team did eventually cook and try a meat sample from rabbit cells.

“It looked and tasted like meat,” Selvaganapathy reports.

The study’s authors say there’s no reason to doubt their process won’t work with growing beef, pork, or chicken in the future. The team adds that their stacking model would also work in a large-scale production setting.

Viable alternative to avoid shortages

Selvaganapathy and Shahin-Shamsabadi say the global meat supply crisis has prompted them to look into the growth of alternative food sources. The duo note that the current demand for meat is straining land and water resources and also contributes to greenhouse gases.

“Meat production today is not sustainable,” says Selvaganapathy. “There has to be another way to create meat.

The McMaster team has already formed a start-up company so they can commercialize the meat-making process. They argue that their new product has the best chance of being accepted by meat eaters; because the promises them meat and fat to order.

The study appears in the journal Cells Tissues Organs.