SCIENCE LAB SCENICS : VERY CULTURED

'' This yogurt recipe's secret ingredient has six legs. '' 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 restaurant 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 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 Sıvgı Mutlu Sirakova, an anthropologist.

Ms. Mutlu Sirakova, a Ph.D student at the University of Munich, grew up in Nova Mahala, a mountain village in Bulgaria. While working on her master's thesis, she became interested in her village's food traditions, especially fermented dairy products 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 ?''

This Publishing continues to Part [2]. The World Students Society thanks Kate Golembiewski.