Processing Mushrooms into Infant Food

KOMPAS/AHMAD ARIF

Various mushrooms cultivated by the Biology Research Center of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) wait on shelves to be processed into a variety of products, ranging from ice cream to yoghurt. They were even used in an experiment to make supplementary food for breast feeding.

Mushrooms can be an alternative source of nutritious food. It is relatively cheap and environmentally friendly. Powdered mushrooms, for example, can be processed into a variety of food and beverage products.

Mushrooms have long been known as a high nutritious food and are usually used in side dishes or snacks. However, mushrooms can be made into a variety of processed foods, from ice cream to yogurt and to complementary foods for breastfeeding.

The high rates of population growth and increasing urbanization are the biggest challenges to meeting food needs in the future. On the one hand, the demand for food continues to increase, while on the other, agricultural lands and workforce are shrinking.

The traditional farming model, which relies on increased farming of monoculture food commodities or the like, will no longer be able to meet the future food demand. To fulfill the carbohydrate intake, the diversity of local food sources is the key. Then what about the fulfilling the protein intake?

As a marine country, fish is a good source of animal protein, but it often faces the problem of increased pollution caused by heavy metal and plastics. Protein from meat is still relatively expensive for the lower and middle classes, because Indonesia still relies on imports to fulfill demands.

Iwan Saskiawan, a Food Microbiology Laboratory researcher at the Biological Research Center of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), is offering mushrooms as a healthy food source for the people.

"Mushrooms not only have a high nutritional content of protein, but are also cheaper than meat. In addition, mushrooms contain many other good nutrients," he said.

Iwan points out that white oyster mushrooms contain 33 percent protein. In comparison, mackerel has 81.58 percent protein, beef has 78.85 percent and chicken has 86.77 percent. However, while beef has 5.5 percent fat, chicken has 4.56 percent fat and mackerel has 4.36 percent fat, white oyster mushrooms contains no fat.

Another advantage is that white oyster mushrooms contain 4.15 percent of crude fiber, while mackerel has 77 percent, beef has 0.32 percent and chicken has 0.89 percent.

"Mushrooms also have a high content of beta glucan, a polysaccharide containing antioxidants," he said. In addition, white oyster mushrooms also contain several active immunomodulatory compounds to improve the immune system’s resistance to disease.

Great potential

Biologically, mushrooms are classified as an organism between plants and animals. "The mushroom is rich in fiber. It also has a high carbohydrate content like plants, but also has complete nutritional content," he said.

From the aspect of agro-climatology and the availability of planting media, according to Iwan, Indonesia has great potential for the development of edible mushrooms. "The two types of mushrooms we recommend are rice straw mushrooms and oyster mushrooms," he said.

Rice straw mushrooms are suitable for growing in the lowlands, which have high humidity and temperatures, while oyster mushrooms are suitable in the highlands, with high humidity and low temperatures.

For planting media, Indonesia is rich in agricultural waste, such as discarded oil palm bunches, sugar palm waste, rice straw, sawdust and timber waste.

"Agricultural waste from farms can be a problem," said Iwan. Once used as a medium for cultivating mushrooms, the waste is good for organic fertilizer because it has degraded naturally. "So, cultivate mushrooms using waste, but without generating waste," he said.

However, even with these potentials, mushroom consumption in Indonesia is still low. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS), mushroom consumption in Indonesia reached only 0.04 kilograms per capita per year in 2009 and rose to only 0.06 kg per capita a year in 2013.

However, according to Iwan, the consumption level is still very low when compared to several other countries. For example, in the UK, mushroom consumption was 1 kg per capita per year, 1.5 kg per capita per year in Canada and 3.4 kg per capita per year in Japan.

Kompas/Totok Wijayanto

Farmers harvest oyster mushrooms cultivated in Gadog, Bogor, West Java, on Monday (20/3). The mushrooms are sold in Bogor city and surrounding areas at Rp 10,000 per kilogram.

Flour

To increase mushroom consumption, the LIPI’s Biological Research Center has developed the mushroom into a variety of processed products over the last few years. An important step to unlocking the versatility of mushrooms as a raw material for food products is to process it into flour. "Mushrooms have a short shelf life after harvest." When used as flour, its nutritional content is not lost," said Iwan.

One of the keys to processing mushrooms is to dry it at the right temperature to preserve the flavor and nutritional content. "We use a temperature of 50 degrees Celsius for three hours. It can be also dried under the sun, especially during drought," he said.

Through two years of research and testing, the Food Microbiology Laboratory at LIPI’s Biological Research Center has successfully turned powdered oyster mushrooms into ice cream and yogurt as complementary foods.

At a recent discussion at LIPI’s Jakarta headquarters, Iwan brought samples of ice cream and processed yogurt. They had no sharp smell of mold, while the fiber provided a unique texture to the ice cream and yogurt.

"The powdered mushrooms makes the microbes in yogurt more stable. For ice cream, the high nutrition from the mushrooms can be added without altering the flavor. These two products have been disseminated to the public. Next, we will evaluate and then patent them through the LIPI Innovation Center," he said.

In addition to these two products, LIPI developed powdered oyster mushrooms last year as a supplementary food (MPASI) for infants. The main reason to develop the mushrooms as supplementary food was the high rate of stunting [among children] in Indonesia," said Ryan Haryo Setiawan, a researcher at LIPI’s Biological Research Center.

"We innovate to find food with good nutrition that is relatively cheap and can be processed locally," he said. In addition to powdered oyster mushrooms, Ryan also developed tempeh flour, rice flour and skim milk powder as supplementary foods. The results were instant flour with high nutritional content that is easily reconstituted with hot water.

The formulation of instant powdered mushrooms has been adjusted to the national standard for supplementary foods, or the SNI 01.7111.1-2005. "The fiber content of powdered mushrooms meets the standard of under 5 percent," he said. LIPI’s Biological Research Center continues to create prototype supplementary foods from powdered mushrooms.

"We are optimistic that this could be a good source of nutritious food suitable for babies and can be made locally at a broad scale," said Ryan. Studies show that the absence of amino acids, iron (Fe), zinc (Zn) and vitamin A in baby food as the cause of stunting. Providing quality milk can prevent stunting. For infants over six months, it is also necessary to provide supplementary foods with high nutritional content. Supplementary infant foods made from powdered oyster mushrooms and tempeh flour meet the requirements for good nutrition.

In addition to helping meet the nutritional needs of infants, the formula of these supplementary foods can help prevent obesity. This is due to low fat content in mushroom flour as well astempeh flour.