Diners at Alchemist, an eatery in Copenhagen, have signed on for the unusual. The restaurant, ranked the fifth-best in the world, serves pigeon aged in beeswax and lambs’ brains piped into bleached lamb skulls and garnished with roasted mealworms. So when Leonie Jahn, a Danish microbiologist, learned that the restaurants’ chefs were experimenting with an old Bulgarian recipe for yogurt, she was not shocked, but she was intrigued.
They were dropping ants into milk.
“I was like, ‘OK, that sounds interesting,’” said Dr. Jahn, a senior researcher at the Technical University of Denmark.
Most yogurt is made by adding a starter culture of live bacteria to milk, fermenting the milk until it’s thick and tangy. What was the secret of the bug yogurt?
“Like, what are the ants doing?” she wondered. “Is it the acidity? Is it the microbes?”
These questions culminated in a paper published Friday in the journal iScience that required that lots of ants be sent to a milky grave in the name of research.
Dr. Jahn began seeking other scientists to help solve the mystery and found her way to Sevgi Mutlu Sirakova, an anthropologist.
Ms. Mutlu Sirakova, a Ph.D. student at University College London, grew up in Nova Mahala, a small mountain village in Bulgaria. While working on her master’s thesis, she became interested in her village’s food traditions, especially fermented dairy like yogurt.
“It’s a staple in our village because every family used to have its own cows,” Ms. Mutlu Sirakova said. She interviewed elders in the community about traditional yogurt recipes, which include ingredients such as spring rain and plant roots.
Then her grandmother said, “Oh, do you know that I used to use ants?”
A network of biologists who had developed an interest in the ant yogurt, including Dr. Jahn, eventually met Ms. Mutlu Sirakova, who arranged for a small team to visit her village and attempt to recreate the original recipe.
Ms. Mutlu Sirakova’s uncle gave the research team a crash course in ant yogurt making. The team took four red wood ants and dropped them in a small container of warm milk. They then sealed the container, buried it in the ant hill, and left it there overnight.
The next day, the researchers removed the insects from the partially coagulated concoction and gave it a taste. It “had a slightly tangy taste with mild herbaceousness and pronounced flavors of grass-fed fat,” according to the research paper.
Back in the lab, Dr. Jahn still wanted to know what about the ants caused this fermentation. She and her colleagues recreated the yogurt-making process using a similar species of wood ant found in Denmark and conducted a variety of chemical analyses.
They determined that the ants contributed several types of acids and enzymes that worked together to coagulate the milk. These include formic acid, which the ants produce as a defense mechanism, as well as strains of lactic and acetic acids produced by bacteria living in the ants’ guts. And once the ants start the yogurt culture, more yogurt can be created by adding additional milk — no need for more insects.
“It’s really a sequence of events that is unlike any dairy fermentation I’ve ever seen,” said Paul Kindstedt, a cheese historian and professor emeritus of food science at the University of Vermont, who was not involved with the project. “There’s really a lot of interesting science to be done to understand this strange yogurt.”
For Ms. Mutlu Sirakova, the study preserves a nearly forgotten tradition from her community, while also potentially unlocking health benefits.
Yogurts contain live bacteria that help us digest our food and mount immune responses. Different fermentation agents can yield diverse microbial communities that aren’t part of most modern, homogenized diets. “It’s quite important to keep the diversity alive,” Ms. Mutlu Sirakova said. Even if that diversity includes microbes contributed by ants.
Despite the potential health benefits, don’t expect to see ant yogurt in your grocery store’s dairy aisle anytime soon, in part because ants can carry disease-causing parasites. As such, the experts advise against attempting to recreate the recipe at home. “Don’t think, ‘I’m going to go out and get some ants,’” Dr. Kindstedt cautioned.
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