Cooking up mealworms into a tasty, healthful, meat-like seasoning

Beetle larvae, such as mealworms, are often considered to be creepy, crawly nuisances. But these insects are edible and could be a healthful alternative to traditional meat protein sources. Today, researchers report that they've cooked up mealworms with sugar, creating a "meat-like" flavouring. It could someday be used in convenience foods as a tasty source of extra protein.

The global population is expected to reach 9.7 billion people by 2050, according to the United Nations. And feeding them all with animal meat—especially cows, pigs and sheep—will require larger amounts of food, water and land resources. In addition, cows are a substantial contributor to climate change, releasing copious amounts of methane in their burps. So, more sustainable sources of protein are needed.

Researchers compared mealworm aromas throughout its lifecycle, from egg to larva to pupa to adult. While there were some differences in the individual compounds, all of the stages primarily contained volatile hydrocarbons, which evaporate and give off scents.

According to the team, the flavour compounds from roasting and frying included pyrazines, alcohols and aldehydes, and were similar to the compounds formed when meat and seafood are cooked.

Based on these results, the team expected that additional reaction flavours could be produced from the protein-rich mealworms if they were heated with sugar.

Different manufacturing conditions and ratios of powdered mealworm and sugars, producing multiple versions of reaction flavours. A total of 98 volatile compounds in the samples. The team then took the samples to a panel of volunteers to provide feedback about which had the most favourable "meat-like" door. As a result of this study, 10 of the reaction flavours were optimized based on consumer preferences.

To the best of the researchers' knowledge, this is the first time that mealworms have been used to produce desirable reaction flavours. They hope that these results will contribute to the commercial development of meat-like and savoury flavourings and seasonings, and will encourage the convenience food industry to include edible insects in their products.