Yogurt from Ants: Food Science at a Five-Star Restaurant

At one of the world’s finest restaurants, Alchemist in Copenhagen, a menu item invited a scientific study. It was the restaurant’s yogurt fermented with ants. Why in the world did this traditional Bulgarian yogurt require ants? What were those ants doing to help make yogurt from milk?

They produce yogurt that has “a slight tangy taste with mild herbaceousness and pronounced flavors of grass-fed fat,” according to the researchers who studied it. Paul Kindstedt is a cheese historian and emeritus professor of food science at the University of Vermont who played no role in this research. But he tells the New York Times he finds it fascinating:

“It’s really a sequence of events that is unlike any dairy fermentation I’ve ever seen. There’s really a lot of interesting science to be done to understand this strange yogurt.”

The Bugs in the Bugs

Veronica Sinotte and colleagues published their research into this unusual yogurt Friday in iScience. They brought ethnography, biology, and gastronomy together to understand how these ants produce a traditional Bulgarian yogurt.

Their most basic finding is that both the ants themselves and the bacteria that come with them play a role in the fermentation. Frutilactobacillus sanfranciscensis is the bug in the bugs that makes this work. It is a bacterium that’s also useful for sourdough bread fermentation.

Formic acid from these red ants (they sting with it) along with lactic and acetic acid from the bacteria help to start the fermentation. But both the ants and the bacteria also contribute casein-active proteases that may further contribute to the texture of this yogurt.

Non-Industrial Food Processing

This is the food science of non-industrial food processing. In summarizing their work, the authors tell us:

“Milk fermentation has a rich history in which food culture, the environment, and microbes intersect. However, traditional practices and their associated microbes have largely been replaced by industrial processes.

“Our findings highlight the value of integrating traditional and biological frameworks to uncover the origins and applications of fermented food microbes.”

We can’t imagine Danone dropping ants into their process for making yogurt.

Click here for the research in iScience, here and here for more on this fascinating yogurt.

Ant Hill, painting by Marianne von Werefkin / WikiArt

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October 5, 2025