Yahoo! News reporter Rob Waugh was one of a select number of journalists invited to witness the unveiling of the world's first test tube burger...

“Even if I had closed my eyes, I would have known the difference - it was crunchy, like a cake, and the texture was... surprising,” says Austrian food researcher Hanni Ruetzler.

Food writer Josh Schonwald says, “You mentioned the word cake - that’s what it was like... an animal protein cake.”

The burger looks much like a traditional one - a perfect pink disc with colour added from beetroot juice. In a frying pan, it sizzles like the real thing – although the way it goes brown is slightly artificial, like a frozen supermarket burger. It also seems to lack the smell of the real thing.

It’s the first laboratory-grown burger ever served to members of the public.

Chef Richard McGowan cooked it in front of an audience in a small studio in West London. The crowd included film crews from Japan and a smattering of technologists from firms aiming to enter the synthetic meat industry.

The burger has “lived” in a dish for three months - “shorter than it takes to grow a cow”, points out Dutch physician Dr Mark Post. The cells grow in a jelly in a Petri dish, supplied with serums and antibiotics, “flexing” as they grown into tiny tubes.

Post’s “cultured beef” is meant to act as a subsitute, to offset the environmental costs of growing “real” beef. As it is cooked, Ruetzler says, "I'm very keen to taste it, it's a very interesting technology."

"If I offered this to people in the streets - probably their primary answer would be, "No, are you out of your mind?" Post says. He informs the room that the name - “cultured beef” - was chosen because 'it’s better than Frankenburger'. The technology could be used to create anything from pork to chicken.

Despite pleas from the audience, only three people tasted the burger - the two critics and the burger’s creator. The few crumbs of meat left over were spirited away - although Post suggested he might feed them to his children later.

More than one trillion cells can be grown from one cell taken from a cow, Post says - enough for ten tonnes of meat. Post says, "We took muscle from a cow through a harmless procedure - they contain cells that can repair tissue when it's injured. We make from one cell 40 billion cells - enough for a burger. We let them form into tissues - muscle fibres . There are 20,000 muscle fibres in that hamburger."

Schonwald says that the texture of the “minced” fibres is better than the textured vegetable proteins currently used in “mock meats” - and somewhere "between" those and a McDonalds burger.

source: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/first-lab-grown-burger-is--like-a-protein-cake--143413831.html#rMZO7oy