Insect-Inspired Udon Noodles
For many university students, buying food that is healthy, eco-friendly, and easy on the wallet can be hard.
Three students in the Food, Nutrition and Health program designed a new product that would hit all three marks, plus one more—they wanted a new product that would also speak to their Asian heritage. After months of research and testing, Wyat Leung, Jasper Yuen, and Wesley To created a high protein cricket udon noodle, which they called Dan Dan Udon Noodle.
“We decided to create a product based on sustainable and cost-efficient insect protein,” said Leung. “But we know that cricket protein’s distinct flavour, coupled with some cultural aversion to insect consumption, hinders its acceptance. Inspired by flavours from our Asian roots and our love for convenient foods, we used the Dan Dan Udon to help overcome this aversion.”
They designed a product that would be inexpensive for students like themselves, innovative (beyond just using tofu), healthy (high in protein, 94% of cricket protein is bioavailable to the body), and good for the planet. They estimate the cost of each package of noodles would be less than $6.
“Currently, insect protein can be found in bars, protein powders, western pastas, snacks, and baking mixes, with little reach into Asian cuisine,” said Yuen, a Food and Nutritional Sciences Double Major.
“There is a wide-open opportunity for processed insect-based Asian cuisine foods to break into the insect-protein and high-protein market.”
Through their research, they discovered that cricket protein was incorporated into bread, which helped inspire their idea to create noodles. They later discovered research where cricket protein was used in rice noodles, with an acceptable (in terms of taste and texture) amount being 8% substitution of rice flour with cricket protein.
As students with a strong interest in food, they were already experienced with making their own chili oil, and they did sample testing with friends.
To explains the testing process: “We substituted wheat flour with cricket protein at 5%, 15%, and 25%, and prepared the udon in duplicates. We had samples evaluated by five of our friends and there was a consistent consensus of noticing distinct astringent earthy notes, plus an increase in sliminess and graininess, in samples with more than 15% cricket flour.”
In the end, they agreed that 15% of cricket protein was acceptable and maintained the stretchy texture of the noodles. Then, they investigated eliminating odors through lactic acid fermentation, dehydrating the cricket powder in the noodles to further remove unwanted flavours, and developing low-cost, sustainable packaging.
The students were motivated to tackle this intense research through FNH 303: Food Product Development, where they had learned about a competition at the 22nd World Congress of Food Science and Technology in Italy in September 2024. They knew that they would be invited to the congress if their product hit a high enough bar— and it did.
Leung and Yuen travelled to Italy to present their Dan Dan Udon Noodle in the Undergraduate Student Product Development competition, where it was tested for hedonic acceptance among food scientists from around the world. Their team name was Entomodachi, which combines entomophagy (eating insects) and tomodachi (Japanese term for friends).
Seeing how others worked through the process of food product development was eye-opening.
“I think that the competition has given us valuable insight into the operational scale of what a successful food product takes,” said Leung. “We don’t exactly have an undergraduate course here at UBC that puts everything together in a practical setting, so going to the competition, it was great to look at how other universities did food science and food product development.”
“I think that some of us might push the boundaries of what we’ve learned to create something even better in the future.”
