Chef who doesn't like Marmite creates 'mellower' version

Transcript

00:00Hello, my name is Matt from Hive Mind Mead in Borucco, and I'm Joe, chef manager at Hearts Bank

00:11preschool, and we are supposing our way jointly responsible for this. It's our baby. So I keep

00:19bees, my brother and I run Hive Mind Meadery down in Coldacott just on the Welsh border,

00:23and we keep bees in the Monmouthshire and Gloucestershire countryside. We use the honey

00:30the bees make to create mead and soft drinks as well, and beer, and this is the result of a

00:37by-product of the fermentation for mead. So we add yeast to honey, mix water in, and we let the

00:46yeast eat the sugar in the honey to create alcohol and carbon dioxide,

00:49and during that process the yeast will increase from a 500 gram block to about 12, 13 kilos

00:56really, so it increases by a lot of volume, and it eats the sugar, and when it's run out of sugar

01:02it settles to the bottom of the tank, and then I give it to Joe. Yeah, so what I found out from

01:07Matt is that they they're almost completely zero waste. They use everything, all the products,

01:12apart from the dead yeast. It can be reused a few times, but then the yeast is going to die,

01:17so I said to Matt, what do you do with it then, and he said, well we'll just get rid of it.

01:20I run Hartsbourne Cookery School as a zero waste as much as possible, and I thought that there must

01:25be something we can do with it, because I know that the trug from brewing is always smelling

01:30incredible, it's got loads of flavour profiles, so I thought let's have a play with it, turn it into

01:34some sort of marmite-esque, that was what I had in my head anyway. So when I got it, it was about

01:4110 litres of a sort of thick liquid, put it in the oven, 60 degrees, let it reduce down for about

01:48a week, every now and again just giving it a stir and down and down and down, then put it into a

01:52high power blender, got it into that sort of caramel ganache texture, and then aged it in

02:00the dehydrator for another week, just in a backpack bag, and now we are, yeah, we're thinking of what

02:05it can do, the flavour profile has blown me away, there's so much going on in there,

02:11so many different uses from a chef's point of view, my head's pinging all over the place.

02:17So now we just, I think we've settled on Hivemite. We have Hivemite, yep. We've settled on Hivemite

02:22as a name, and we're going to look into what we can do with it going forward. This is really great

02:29as a jumping off point, I think we can look at what we can do with it in terms of application,

02:34I think we can look at ways we can change it, vary it, I'm not going to say improve it, it's already

02:38really delicious, but I'm sure we could vary it slightly, and that might appeal to different

02:42people, and different uses. We've got to do some shelf life and nutritional testing on it to see

02:50again what uses we can put to it, and make sure it's ready to change the world through innovation

02:58and zero waste. Definitely. Yeah, it's really exciting. There's so much going on in there,

03:03it can be sweet and savoury. For me, anything from a chocolate cake to a steak butter,

03:09all sorts in there. It should be fun finding out, and I'm very interested to find out

03:14what the lab comes back with as well. Yeah, it's going to be really high in vitamin B,

03:18which is, a lot of people take brewer's yeast as a vitamin B supplement, so it's going to be really

03:22high in that because that's what it is. It's not really had anything added to it has it? Nothing

03:26at all, no, so we've just concentrated the flavour. Yeah, it'll be really exciting.