A story of my efforts to recreate 'Vegemite,' the 'world's most disgusting jam,' using familiar ingredients
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Vegemite is a fermented food mainly produced in Australia, and its main ingredient is yeast extract, a by-product of beer brewing, giving it a unique flavor. For this reason, Vegemite is also known as the 'world's worst jam,' but on the other hand, it is so common in Australia that it is said that 'if you don't like Vegemite, you're not Australian.' David Millington, an engineer from Australia who lives in Estonia in Northern Europe, has reported the results of actually recreating the taste of Vegemite in order to clarify the question, 'What kind of food is Vegemite?'
Adventures Making Vegemite ⸺ Dave on Design
https://daveon.design/adventures-making-vegemite.html
Vegemite is a paste-like condiment with a strong, salty flavor and a pungent aroma, and is often eaten on toast like jam. Due to its salty taste and fermented ingredients, Millington describes it as 'similar to solidified soy sauce.' There is a brewer's yeast food called Marmite that is spread on toast in the UK, and similar foods can be found in Germany and Switzerland, so there are similar foods that people like, but according to Millington, neither of them have the same flavor or texture as Vegemite.
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How To Cook That, a YouTube channel by Anne Reardon who shares cooking methods and ingredients, released a movie called 'What's in Vegemite?' at the end of February 2024. In the movie, while listening to people from Australia who are familiar with Vegemite, the taste of Vegemite is reproduced by combining yeast extract and seasonings.
What is really in vegemite? - YouTube
In Mr. Reardon's movie, he adjusted the taste while looking at the Vegemite ingredient list, and as a result, people from Australia have been rated as 'almost the same taste as Vegemite.' However, since the exact recipe of how much seasoning was mixed is not introduced, Mr. Millington tried to make Vegemite with a friend from the UK who likes Marmite.
The first ingredient in making Vegemite is brewer's yeast. While Reardon used a homemade centrifuge to separate the yeast from beer, Millington created a dark brown syrup by boiling down the top layer of beer that had been left in a friend's fridge for a few days. 'At first, the kitchen smelled like boiling beer, but it quickly changed to a smell that was recognizable as Vegemite,' Millington said.
From over 0.5 liters of beer yeast slurry, about 2 to 3 tablespoons of syrup were produced, which was then gradually seasoned. The syrup 'had the flavor of Vegemite, but was quite bitter, perhaps due to the influence of the hops in the beer.' Separately, when nutritional yeast powder, a yeast fermented with pasteurized molasses, was mixed with warm water, something 'that wasn't Vegemite, but tasted like Vegemite' was created. In the image below, on the left is yeast syrup made from beer, and on the right is a sweet paste made from nutritional yeast.
I added about 3 teaspoons of yeast slurry, about half a teaspoon of malt and plenty of salt, then mixed in about 1 teaspoon of nutritional yeast paste. Vegemite has a very salty taste, so I adjusted the taste by adding more salt.
The finished paste 'isn't exactly like Vegemite, but it's pretty close, and you could almost say it's Marmite itself,' Millington said. 'You get a strong salty hit, then the distinctive Marmite flavour. There's a slight bitterness in the background, and the aftertaste is just like Vegemite.' The friends who helped him create his original Vegemite also commented, 'It tastes pretty close to Marmite or Vegemite, although the real thing might be a bit more bitter.'
The image below shows two pieces of toast with four different pastes. From the left, Marmite, the one made by Millington and his team, a umami spread made by another Czech friend that has a completely different taste but is similar in color to Vegemite and Marmite, and on the far right is nutritional yeast paste spread as is. As you can see in this image, the taste is close to Vegemite and Marmite, but the color of the paste made by Millington and his team is quite different.
As Vegemite has 'Vege-' in it, it also contains extracts of vegetables such as celery and onion, which may affect its color and taste. Since we did not try such seasonings in this cooking, Millington stated his goal, 'Next time, I would like to try adding celery salt and onion powder after considering the type of beer from this recipe.' In response to this challenge, Millington said, 'By carefully recreating the tastes I'm used to eating, I was intrigued by how people invented such things in the first place.'
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