Chemical engineers from UNSW Sydney have successfully created a plant-based cheese that melts, stretches and browns under the grill just like the real thing.

The discovery has been described as paving the way for more realistic dairy and meat alternatives that blend plant proteins with complex carbohydrates.

Professor Cordelia Selomulya has been working on plant-based food structures at UNSW since 2019, and said the colours and the flavours were the easy part of the process.

“Replicating the structure – that pull of melted cheese, or the juicy mouthfeel of meat – is the real challenge,” she said.

Although plant-based alternatives have been on the market for many years, some of the products available today fall short as they can behave strangely under heat, fail to effectively deliver the nutrition promised on the label – including sufficient protein – and simply lack the sensory properties of dairy-based products.

Prof Selomulya and her team at UNSW School of Chemical Engineering are working to change that by working on layering plant-based proteins with naturally occurring polysaccharides, which are complex sugars and dietary fibres, to mimic the feel of animal products.

The team’s most recent breakthrough is a plant-based cheese that pairs pea protein with polysaccharides for a more life-like texture.

“By focusing on polysaccharide blends we’re now able to achieve the kind of elasticity and structure you’d normally associate with dairy cheese,” Dr Yong Wang, a lead investigator on the project, said.

“We’ve also made progress in preserving key nutrients, which is something most commercial products don’t do well.”

The blend of proteins and polysaccharides interacts to create stable, flexible networks so the food product holds its shape during freezing or heating. This process also allows the team to microencapsulate fat-soluble nutrients such as vitamin D and stabilise water-soluble nutrients like calcium and vitamins to survive the heating that comes with cooking.

“The next step is to find commercial partners,” Prof Selomulya said.

“We now have a process that is easily scalable. We don’t need special equipment and we have a provisional patent that we can license.”

Prof Selomulya said she’s not aiming to replace dairy or meat entirely, the aim of her projects is to use plant-based innovations to reduce pressure on the environment, while expanding food choices.

“Our technology just allows us to create valuable, sustainable food products using crops that are already abundant in Australia,” she said.