Vegemite, an Aussie icon made right here in Melbourne. It has been said
that if you don't like Vegemite you're not an Australian. Everyone loves Veggimite. You're
not an Aussie if you don't. I really like vegimite and butter on toast.
Vegiemite for lunch is the best. For my whole
life as long as I can remember every day I've eaten vegemite.
Taste like Australia. I was born here in Australia I'm a true blue
Aussie and I think Vegemite on toast for breakfast
is just the worst.
Not all Australians like Vegemite.
But lots of us do apparently 80% of households in Australia have a jar of Vegemite in their
Pantry including us I think the key is is you need to have been brought up eating
it if you didn't have it as a child I don't think there's much hope for growing to love
it. Excuse me oh I still with the taste of it in my mouth. The factory that makes this stuff
is here in Melbourne on Vegemite way it makes more than 22 million jars of this stuff every
year so it is very popular but despite their best efforts to export it overseas 98% of those
jars are consumed right here in Australia the rest of the world just doesn't seem to get it
what is Vegemite is a thick black Australian food spread made from leftover brewers yeast extract
with various vegetable and spice additives you're going to hate it is it really that bad
mhm I want to yes yes yes
Down the Hatch
people like this?
Hugh Jackman will tell you that's because you're all eating it wrong
you're not supposed to eat it by the Spoonful just put a little bit
on toast with butter. Maximum what maximum Vegemite, no more than that
Right much better. I'm not sure that
works for my palette tried it yet no no okay are greated no no out
the so bad oh help it's so salty it's so salty it's so salty I'm crying.
I am convinced that those jazs that are sold internationally surely must be sold to Australians
who are living abroad and missing their Vegemite because no one else seems to be into it which is
something that I think Australians are quite proud of that they like it and nobody else
does I'm on a mission today to number one see if we can figure out the secret recipe for this
stuff how is it actually made what's in it? And number two to see if using the key ingredients
in it can we make something else can we alter it and change the recipe. There's not a thing
that I would change to make something that's a little more palatable for me and hopefully
the rest of you last year Dave and I went along to the 100th birthday celebration of
Vegemite. I have never been to a party
before where I wasn't tempted to eat anything. I didn't want anything that they had on offer even
the donuts had Vegemite in them and Dave wasn't even keen on those. The Vegemite recipe is a
closely guarded secret and at the party we didn't get to go onto the factory floor it was just a
party but we did get to speak to some interesting people and you said it wasn't very popular when
it came out? No it no one really liked it and um it you know it's an acquired taste as you
know but over the years it eventually caught on with the public so it took a little while but it
got there. My grandfather that invented veggie Mart 100 years ago Fred Walker the Melbourne
entrepreneur had hunted my grandfather who was a brilliant scientist specifically to come up with
a a similar product if not and make it better. And how long did it take? It took the better part of a
year started from scratch nothing and then over the process of the year through trial and error
he came up with the product that we now know and love today. I don't have a year to figure this out
I only have a week and a half so I might be in trouble here but I do have the ingredients list
which very similar to Marmite the first ingredient is yeast extract and I know from talking to people
that that yeast is coming from the waste product from making beer another thing that Australia
seems to love that I personally don't like. But to make beer you basically need a sugary solution
and that sugar is coming from wheat and barley and then you also add some hops now hops are the
flowers from hops plants and they're added to keep the beer fresher and they're a major contributor
to the flavor smell and the bitterness of the beer and then you add to that mixture a tiny
little packet of yeast and then you leave it for a week and the yeast gets to work turning that
sugar into carbon dioxide bubbles and alcohol. Yeast is actually a single cell microorganism
and if conditions are right if there's enough air if there's the right amount of sugar and if the
temperature is perfect it will multiply every 90 minutes by budding to form a new cell so if
the number of yeast cells doubles every 90 minutes and we leave it for a week by the end of that time
each individual yeast cell could turn into 5192 296 858534 827 62853 0496 329 22096 yeast cells
I'd be overrun by yeast but the conditions are not perfect because they're not trying to produce
yeast they're trying to produce beer so if you put this on a time lapse and you watch it over a whole
week of it fermenting you'll see at first there are lots and lots and lots of bubbles and then it
starts to slow down and eventually it stops and the yeast goes dormant and it all drops down to
the bottom. Now we need to drain the beer off into sterile bottles this is the bit most people want
but I'm only interested in the yeasty slurry at the bottom that gets sent to the Vegemite factory.
The first thing we need to do is heat this stuff up to kill the yeast cuz we don't actually want
live yeast in the spread and this will also split open the yeast cells. I know this looks
like caramel but believe me it stinks of beer now ideally I want to separate this out into solids
and liquids and to do that a centrifuge would be the ideal tool but I don't have a centrifuge
so I'm going to attempt to make a homemade version of that. My pineapple corer makes the perfect size
holes in this pool noodle for these tubes that I have to fit in so let's fill them up with the
yeast mixture put the pool noodle into my washing machine. Add the tubes and put it on a spin cycle.
It is spinning fast I'm hoping this is enough to do the job unfortunately the tubes have gone from
being flat to being upright which is not good but let's see if it did anything or not look at
that it actually worked that is awesome I need to work on it a little bit to see if I can get
them to stay flat but that's a great start it means we can tip off the clear liquid and leave
the solids in the tube. It turns out putting a wet towel over the top of the tubes weighs them
down and helps keep them flat so the solids are just at the bottom which makes it much easier to
pour it off. By using the washing machine as a centrifuge we've turned this into this and
this to make Vegemite I am guessing we're going to need to boil this down to evaporate off some
of the water and make it thicker I walked away at this point not expecting that this would happen...
So now I've lost some of the liquid it's not like I can just get more of this stuff it took
a week to make. It would be a lot easier if I was just getting a delivery from a brewery but
I don't have that available to me. Vegemite is really thick and the more I boil it down
it's not turning into a paste like this it looks like the color of Vegemite but
it's just not thick enough I'm wondering if I let it cool down if will thicken up no it
doesn't so the texture is completely wrong but to me this does taste like Vegemite but
let me get the experts to taste it. Hmm, it's it's got vegemite hues.
Oh it tastes like a chemical like it has a little bit of vegemite kind of after taste.
It's quite veggimighty just like
that it's almost a bit more meaty than vegemite. let's see if it thickens up if I boil a little
bit of it even more it doesn't make a paste instead it turns into this stretchy substance
that's not at all like the texture of vegemite if we take another look at the ingredients to
see what else is in it it contains yeast extract salt mineral salts malt extract color flavors and
B vitamins and that's it so there's nothing else in this that would thicken it up which
means they must be using that other portion of the yeast that we had so let's tip that into a
pan and boil it up to get the water out of it and it does indeed thicken up into a paste that is
about the consistency of Vegemite but to me this tastes so disgusting. If you thought veite was
bad this is worse it's like beer chemically horrible but let's see what Dave thinks 😉
Oh Yuk! It tastes like uh beer mousse. It's not Vegemite? no.
Oh nasty chemical beer Yuk. I'm wondering if the type of
hops and the flavor of the beer is affecting what that tastes like and if you somehow need to wash
that yeast or make a completely different type of beer I don't have any expertise in beer and
beer flavors and I don't have another week to make another batch of it so we're just going
to have to use the other portion of it and add the other ingredients and see if that tastes
close enough looking at the nutrition information panel I can see how much sodium's in it and from
that I can calculate how much salt we need to add Vegemite is really quite a salty spread so
it is a fair bit and I know from the ingredients list that there is less malt extract in it than
there is salt so we'll just add a little bit of that and mix it all together and then we'll put
that on some toast it's pretty good tastes very similar to Veggimite maybe a little bit
weaker in flavor. Hmm it's not veggemite it's not bad. Tastes very chemically. it's also a
bit too like gloopy um whereas veggimite is you know you can spread it quite thin like butter.
Tough crowd! So let me think about this we started with the beer and we got the yeast
slurry from the bottom and then we spun it to separate it and boil it to get these two parts
while this one nearly has the taste of Vegemite this one has the texture but it tastes horrible
possibly due to the Hops in the beer so what if we replaced that that part with nutritional yeast
flakes these are deactivated yeast that has just been dried and by adding water to it we
get a similar consistency to what we got from the beer. Now this tastes very cheesy on its
own and definitely doesn't have the horrible chemical taste of this one so let's mix some
of these two together and see how that tastes. That's pretty good very very good actually that
tastes almost identical to Vegemite. It's very similar it's very close.
Yep that's Vegemite yum! Yay I figured out a recipe
that works for Vegemite now I want to know can we use the yeast extract to make something that
tastes yummy to me I know lots of people like Vegemite not trying to offend you but I want
to make something that tastes good to me now from tasting this stuff I know that it itself is pretty
strong so I think it's going to work best if it's added to other things I did a number of
experiments and made a whole heap of recipes and found that this actually works really well
as a soy sauce replacement which is good for anyone who is allergic to soy sauce. I tried
it in a dipping sauce sauce for sushi. The same chemical taste mixed with like
a little bit of spice but then also sour but then also sweet it's so bad.
Hmm yeah very nice.
And in a honey soy glaze on meat. it's good it's good um it probably
needs a tad more salt to match the salt and the soy sauce but yum.
yeah not good.
It's good I like it and the Umami flavor in this is also useful in sweet dishes to
bring down that sweetness a little bit I tried it in some chocolate ganache.
Yum. It almost
just makes it taste like a darker chocolate like it's got a little bit more bitterness.
Normal ganaches can be a bit sickly sweet that um that's sort of taken the sweet
edge of it it's actually really nice. That's really good I love that that's
that's better than normal chocolate ganache so that was a win but if I had have added Vegemite
to those recipes I would not have liked it it would have tasted way too Vegemite and
whenever they've released like Vegemite brownies or Vegemite chocolate people are not into it it
just doesn't combine well probably because of all of the salt so if they want it to appeal
to more people keep this as it is for the lovers of Vegemite but perhaps for the rest of us take
it back a step and give us a sauce that's not so concentrated and doesn't have all the salt in it
cuz this is a great addition to lots of recipes. Let me know if there's any other secret recipes
you want me to try and figure out for you and if you are a Vegemite fan I do have some gear
that we got from the 100-year celebration some exclusive collectibles and stuff like that if
you want a chance to win those head on over to patreon to figure out how to do that. Speaking
of patrons this is a list of amazing people they are absolute Legends and they support
this channel every month. Make it a great week by being kind to others and I'll see you on Friday