UAE: Desert farm grows superfood using salt water, makes ‘healthy’ burgers

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Delicious varieties salicornia currently being utilized for ‘salted flavour with much less salt’ in hamburger patties

A sturdy plant expanded utilizing seawater is growing in the UAE’s desert ranches and also assisting develop “healthy and balanced” hamburgers, revealing lasting farming’s possibility in the most difficult problems.

Salicornia, a delicious, is currently being utilized as a salt substitute in hamburger patties – a farming success in the United Arab Emirates.

” You have the salted flavour with much less salt, however you additionally have various other advantages,” stated Tina Siegismund, head of advertising and also technology at UAE-based Worldwide Food Industries, an icy food maker.

The asparagus-like plant lowers salt web content by 40 percent in the business’s healthy and balanced hamburgers, which additionally include poultry, quinoa and also kale.

Belonging to components of The United States and Canada, Europe, South Africa and also South Asia, the plant is perfect for the UAE’s environment, and also has anti-bacterial and also anti-inflammatory residential or commercial properties, according to Siegismund.

Salicornia farming started in 2014 in a variety of ranches throughout the UAE as component of an experiment utilizing salt water run-off from desalination plants by the Dubai-based International Facility for Biosaline Farming (ICBA).

Augusto Becerra Lopez-Lavalle, primary researcher at ICBA, stated study was currently underway right into creating even more of the “high-value plant”, which costs $20 a kilo (2.2 extra pounds) in France.

” We went from … developing this model, to piloting at range with 8 farmers, and also currently the inquiry is just how to scale up,” Lopez-Lavalle informed AFP.

In the future, salicornia can “end up being an actually essential food active ingredient”, he included.

” If there is a financial worth and also the manufacturing system is established for this, it can end up being a substitute for salt and also any type of various other trace elements that are included today synthetically to refined food.”

In the meantime, salicornia stays a specific niche item, its health and wellness advantages unidentified to most, confesses Siegismund.

” It’s not an item that makes huge, huge revenue, however our team believe in it and also we will certainly proceed,” she stated.