Marmite!

The Wikipedia article on Marmite notes something I didn't know: Marmite actually came before Vegemite. I recall, as a kid, hearing about Vegemite first while learning that it was an Australian thing. Much later, I heard about Marmite, and I guess I assumed that Marmite must have been derived from Vegemite. Well, lo and behold, it's the other way around: Marmite came first.

I bought this Marmite because it's an ingredient in some veggie-burger recipes. Marmite is, as the label says, a yeast extract. The word extract almost always means concentrated in the food world, so Marmite is essentially concentrated, spreadable fungus. Yum. What's funny is that descriptions of Marmite's aroma are so legendary that I already had a "scent picture" in my head, and when I opened up my bottle of the stuff, it smelled exactly as I imagined it would, i.e., a bit like soy sauce. Uncanny.

Making artificial meat usually requires a vegetable-protein base of some sort (or something fibrous like mushrooms or jackfruit, depending on what you're going for), a binding agent like methyl cellulose or xanthan gum, liquid smoke, possibly some molasses (because some people contend molasses has a bit of an iron-like aspect to it that hints at hemoglobin), and one or more umami components. These components come from any number of sources: faux-beef vegetable stock, tamari (a soy-sauce analogue), mushroom powder, nutritional yeast (everybody's go-to ingredient), and, of course, Marmite. Notice how the last three ingredients I mentioned are all fungus-related.

And here we are:

I might try making more veggie burgers and keto buns this coming Sunday. On Saturday, I'm going back to Andong to attempt the other side of the dam. Wish me luck.