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?”