January 27, 2016

‘Lab grown meat to hit shops in five years’

Filed under: Food & Drink,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 9:03 am

Newly founded Dutch company Mosa Meat wants to see lab grown meat in supermarkets in five years’ time. One of the owners of the company, Dutch researcher Mark Post of Maastricht University, was behind the growing of pieces of muscle in a lab, claiming that synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60%. The original lab meat cost 290,000 euro to produce.

Together with Dutch food expert Peter Verstraate Mosa Meat plans to sell lab meat for 10 to 20 euro a kilo, a price that would go down if this ever become a reality and a consumer habit. A select group of people tasted the lab meat in London in 2013 and you can watch a short video on how that went. English chef Richard McGowan prepared burgers, and not Heston Blumenthal as initially suggested. The critics were positive about the taste of lab meat.

“I think most people just don’t realise that the current meat production is at its maximum and is not going to supply sufficient meat for the growing demand in the next 40 years, so we need to come up with an alternative,” Post explains.

There’s already a cookbook for lab meat on standby.

(Link: www.bright.nl)

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August 6, 2014

Lab meat inspires futuristic cookbook

Filed under: Animals,Food & Drink,Science by Orangemaster @ 4:07 pm

Back in early 2012 we told you about lab produced meat being made, and in late 2013 about the meat finally hitting the grill. Now it’s time to level up with a test-tube cookbook called ‘The In Vitro Meat Cookbook” written by Dutch-based scientists, chefs and artists and recently presented in Amsterdam.

“While some dishes are innovative and delicious, others are uncanny and macabre,” such as roast raptor, dodo nuggets and oysters grown from meat stem cells.

The idea was not to get people cooking so much as letting people imagine future possibilities.

(Link: phys.org)

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March 9, 2012

Stealth cheese steals show, cookbook wins in Paris

Filed under: Food & Drink,Literature by Orangemaster @ 4:24 pm

Yes, the Netherlands took first prize at the World Championship Cheese Contest in the US and kicked Switzerland off its pedestal this week, but a group of five women from Groningen also won a Gourmand World Cookbook Award in Paris recently for the cookbook, ‘Koken Met Kruidnoten’ by Karin Sitalsing. They won the award for the illustration of a cookbook that features a lot of ‘kruidnoten’ recipes from local chefs Pierre Wind and Siemen de Jong.

Back to the cheese bit: the winning cheese, Vermeer, is a low-fat Gouda type cheese by Campina from Wolvega, Friesland, and is only called by that name for export, as nobody had ever heard of it until a few days ago. Remember, this is a country that boats Australian Homemade as a Dutch chocolate brand.

(Link: www.rtvnoord.nl, Photo of totally unrelated Gouda by Jon Sullivan, released into the public domain by its author)

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July 7, 2011

‘Flemish cookbook is Greek to the Dutch’

Filed under: Food & Drink,Literature by Orangemaster @ 8:00 am

When I occasionally zap to Jeroen Meus’ cooking show on Belgian TV in the evening, I could play a drinking game and get very messed up by drinking every time he uses Flemish diminutives like ‘evenkes’ (a while) and ‘boske’ (small bunch). As a foreigner who learnt Dutch on the street and who has Flemish friends, I can understand him. So why is a food journalist claiming that the Dutch can’t make out what he’s saying? Because they favour their own words and can’t be bothered to do a little research.

The Dutch journalist said it would be best to translate Meus’ cookbook from Flemish into Dutch, which is a touchy subject. But once the journalist claimed that the cookbook was ‘as good as useless’, it got media attention. It’s a ‘hellish job’ to figure out what the Flemish words mean in the recipes. Really? And all those English/Australian/American variants on products and measurements the Dutch all know by heart? Get real and broaden your horizons already.

(Link: standaard.be, Photo: my easy to understand and make banana muffins, available in normal and vegan variants)

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April 7, 2010

University adds rare Dutch cookbook to its collection

Filed under: Food & Drink,History,Literature by Orangemaster @ 1:05 pm

An extremely rare 17th century Dutch cookbook, entitled ‘Het Koock-boeck oft Familieren Keuken-boeck’ (Cook Book or Family Kitchen Book) is now part of the Special Collections institute of the University of Amsterdam Library. According to Radio Netherlands, it is the oldest known cookery book in the Dutch language. “Prominent Dutchmen like Jacob Cats and Constantijn Huygens owned this book, but it was missing from our extensive gastronomic collection until now.”

For those of you ready to poke fun at Dutch cooking, allow me: this book was apparently aimed at upper class ladies and tried to counter the blandness of Dutch food by introducing Italian produce and herbs.

About half a year ago I remember a friend telling me how they make pizzas in their mobile food stand and having more than 20 people in South Holland asking them ‘what’s that green thing?’ and pointing at the basil leaves on their pizzas.

(Link: rnw.nl)

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April 23, 2009

Political party wants to ban vegetarian cookbook

Filed under: Animals,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 12:46 pm
anti-meatjpg

Henk Jan Ormel, parliament member for the CDA (Christian Democratic Appeal), said yesterday on Dutch radio (Radio 1) that his party wants to forbid the publishing of a vegetarian cookbook of the Voedingscentrum (Dutch Nutrition Centre). He claims it is propaganda for the non-eating of meat (?) and also said that the profit of this book (already assuming it’s going to be published regardless) should be put towards a campaign that explains ‘the social use’ of animal testing.

I once read from Belgian animal activists that the EU is working on a system that will allow companies to compare notes on animal tests already done so they don’t have to inject that shampoo into the rabbit’s eye like 50 times and get the same result.

But for the love of God or whomever, it’s just a cookbook!

(Link: vleesmagazine.nl, Photo: veggieunwrapped.com)

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