Red meat hardly seems like the perfect ingredient for delicious chocolate, but a New Zealand-based food scientist is willing to bet that his high-protein, 50% beef chocolate recipe is going to be a hit.
Mustafa Farouk, Senior Food Technologist at Ag Research has partnered with Auckland boutique chocolate maker Devonport Chocolates to bring meat chocolate to the masses. The quirky idea of combining the two very different ingredients came to Dr. Farouk one day, while looking at ways of adding value to beef and pondering ways the staple food might be consumed in the future. Mixing beef and chocolate seemed like the perfect way for people to get proteins and other nutrients in meat, because chocolate is such a popular dessert.
So Farouk took a very lean cut from the hind quarter of a Waikato-raised bovine, turned into what he calls “chocolate butter”, which I assume is a sort of fine paste, and handed it over to Devonport Chocolates to use in their confectionery. The resulting combination reportedly has a consistency similar to a Turkish delight, and while the food scientist admits you can tell that it’s not regular chocolate, the taste of meat is almost impossible to pick up. In an interview with the New Zealand Herald, Farouk described the taste of beef chocolate as “wonderful”, adding that although people are initially put off by the unique dessert when they here it is 50% beef, once they bite into it and taste the rich chocolate flavor, most agree that it is excellent.
Photo: MARK TAYLOR/FAIRFAX NZ
“We knew we could turn meat into different forms, but whether we could actually fool people by making it look like chocolate is what we didn’t know,” Dr. Farouk said. “When you try it now, you don’t know what you’re eating.” He adds that it’s very easy to change the texture of beef chocolate from very smooth to a dessert that has some body, fiber to it, but from whatever feedback they have released so far, the smooth one is tastier.
Beef chocolate started out as a crazy experiment, but its creator now wants to make it commercially viable. “Devonport are very excited about it and it’s highly likely that we’ll partner with them and try to get it into the market,” he told Stuff.co.nz. “And once people realise the advantages of having this, I’m sure it will take off.” The meat required to make this bizarre treat would cost an estimated $17 a kilogram, and turned into chocolates, it would retail at $2.50 a cube.
Photo: video caption
And this is only the beginning, as Farouk is now experimenting with lamb and venison, to see if they’ll work as well as beef. In the past, the AfResearch scientist also created beef ice-cream, a dairy-free dessert he says was very tasty.
