Turning Mushroom into meat

Transcript (Auto translated can have spelling mistakes)

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Can you see now? There we go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, this is uh actually my company. This is called Fable. And I, you know, you see Fable on my shirt here. This is um the website that we have. It's at fablefood.co.

And this shows our products are made from shitake mushrooms. And uh you know, we've got one of the world's best chefs there, H Blumenthal. You see Zack Efron there with me. We're on the Netflix program, Down to Earth. Uh you can see we're at retailers and restaurants all over the world. So we're we are based in Australia, but we sell in uh Australia, Singapore, United Kingdom, and also USA.

So we've got a lot of different things there in here. You can sort of go to a locator to find it, all the recipes. But you see where I'm putting my mouse there? That's what Fable looks like. It looks like meat. I have developed a mushroombased meat. So that's that's what my business is. And you know, my long my long passion with mushrooms has led to me creating you see it says Jim's secret Texas barbecue style. So like I said, I'm from Texas. The reason I wanted to create mushroombased meat was because I went vegan for a year and uh I wanted to make a product so that I could enjoy the the meaty delicious tastes of meat but not have to actually kill anything to do it. So that that's that's the background of my business. I'll show you some images here of shiitakei mushroom. Uh you can see lots of different things here. Um and I'm just going to zoom in.

So um I'll zoom in on this so you can see uh mushroom stem here. You know where I'm putting my my mouse and I'm Oh, it's uh taking a taking a while to go onto the screen. Let's see. Uh why? Oh, because I'm only sharing that screen. I need to change the screen that I'm sharing. I'm sorry about that.

So, let me stop that one and then change to another screen. Okay, now I will share the shiakei mushroom screen. Here we go. So, shiakei mushrooms are what I make fable out of. And here you have picture.

You know, this is a very famous mushroom in in Asia. It's very very strong glutamates, very strong umami and uh that makes a wonderful thing to to make mushroom uh meat from because it's got a very meaty texture. So if you see where my mouse is over here taste also uh it it tastes like meat meat actually like uh well it's a very strong it's a very strong taste as it is but when you cook it and this is a bit of my background is I have a culinary background and I have a chemical engineering background. So I can manipulate the way that they taste by cooking and with the full understanding of you know you need to change the mushroom taste to a meaty taste. That means essentially there's a a cooking reaction called the mayard reaction that changes mushroom taste to generic meaty taste. And that's what I do because they have such a a high amount of glutamic acid glutamates. That's the umami thing.

You can cook them so that they do taste like meat. But whenever they're raw, they they don't taste like meat. They taste almost like um very sulfuric. You think of like uh sulfur, like uh cooked eggs, you know, sulfur gas sulfuric. If you you have to cook that out, but once you cook that out, they have a very a very earthy, deep umami taste. So yeah, this is what shiakei look like. And this is what they look like when they grow.

uh you know they have a a lovely silky cap but what we do is we actually use the stem. This is actually regional specific mushroom like for example this will only grow in the parts of the texat only. No, no. So, this one grew in the wild of all over Asia and it it actually grows in the in nature in Australia and on different continents. But this is the second most widely cultivated mushroom in the world. So people who grow mushrooms, the big commercial farmers, they this is the second largest one in the