Chapotraphouse

: Beyond Meat

: Black bean burgers

IMO beyond meat tastes more like junk food than actual burgers. What I really want is cheap, mass-produced, frozen bean burgers that I can buy in a big bag like chicken patties. We've long had the technology to do it. Sysco and other restaurant suppliers have it. But for some reason frozen bean burgers must remain a bougie luxury good. There's gotta be some Boca-Beef conspiracy to keep the cheap shit off the shelves.

Really prefer if they'd actually commit to the bit of making veggie burgers their own distinct thing instead of chasing after the American burger experience. Like just imagine the rich flavor if they made the patty with dry sauted mushrooms, minced onions, garlic, carrots, celery, and whatever binders they use to help keep its form. And drizzle on top a nice spiced curry gravy made Kerisik style. And finish it off with some deep fried onion rings on the top and bottom of the patty for that nice crunch before you put them on the buns.

I like them on occasion, but I've mostly gone to this stuff for home cooking when I want something meaty.

Whatever frozen jackfruit patties you can find make awesome crispy chicken style sandwiches, I love the texture and every so often they have deep discounts on jackfruit meat at my local grocery.

impossible isn't vegan, they do animal testing
also very expensive compared to actually vegan alternatives

Nutrient quality: it's a somewhat high protein junk food. Don't eat it too often. It's mostly pea protein and a high viscosity oil, fairly salty. It isn't going to have hormones like the actual animal product.

Health factors: mostly just the salt and high fat content to think about. And maybe think about how much pea protein you're in taking, as processed foods can amplify things like heavy metals in their concentrations. We aren't privy to their internal processes.

Environment: much less impactful than the animal product. Not sure whether it's more impactful than just eating the beans and oil in some other dish, mostly due to weight. If you buy your beans dry, beans probably win. If you buy your beans canned, then you have to compare impacts of transportating something concentrated and processed (fake borger) to something very un-concentrated and with lots of water (bean can). In my opinion this is where you should stop thinking about it because it leads to total process analysis in a system that is opaque and interdependent.

I haven't had one in a while.

I like to have everything homemade, especially because it's cheaper that way (also, see the other points about Impossible testing on rats and whatnot), but I just haven't really thought to do any kind of burgers. If I were more financially stable and all that, I might be willing to order things like TVP and VWG in bulk to do so. Maybe later some day, but most of what I eat is stuff like beans and pasta.

Made these hot dogs out of tofu, though!

The commonalities across brands here are some sort of protein isolate (pea and/or soybean), fat (avocado or coconut oil), a binder (methylcellulose, available over the counter as wallpaper paste), and some additional sources of flavor and color (I think impossible is the one using GMO yeast to make heme, which gives the product a more meaty flavor).

Nutritionally speaking these things are going to be slightly worse than whole foods like beans or tempeh (there's some very limited evidence that suggests that fermentation improves the digestibility of soy) but it's not exactly like vegans eating a balanced diet are coming up short on fiber, especially compared to the typical western diet, and if you're not eating these things as your exclusive protein source you should be fine.

No idea on contamination/food safety but there's not really any red flag ingredients. PFAS mainly come from contaminated water sources if I recall correctly, and lead from contaminated soil, so it probably depends on where the source ingredients are coming from. Anything produced in a bioreactor has to be purified out, so I wouldn't worry about fermentation products.

In terms of environmental/resource impact the fake borgar is considerably lower than a real one and probably marginally above the impact of a block of tofu.

Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.

Meat replacements feel very ::Baudrillard::

I get what you say about the taste. I'm not vegan or vegetarian (though I do keep my meat consumption pretty low over the whole month, just because it's expensive and I can't really afford it), but I do definitely really like veggie burgers and I think a lot of them actually taste better than meat burgers. Different, of course, they don't taste like meat, but that's not why I eat them, I eat them because I like the taste of a veggie burger. But then, I don't go for the ones that try to mimic meat, I go for the ones that are upfront and in your face about being veggie burgers.

The AI bubble deflated the Lab Grown Meat stock bubble, so the other day I was watching Canal Rural and a rancher porky was joyously saying "vegans failed, the price of meat is skyrocketing and all the fake meat startups are dead, vegan restaurants failed and the ideology is not so on vogue"

I hated so much their disgusting smile

i was about to post animal meat vs meat alternatives but! i read your post again and you mean "relative to other vegan food options" rather than a "comparison between animals vs vegan meat", yeah? in that case i have no clue where i'd begin to search and I'll just wait here with you

Dinner tonight was vegan bacon cheeseburgers with lightlife bacon and impossible burgers and they tasted pretty good.

I don't prefer making (faux)meat-forward meals but I do occasionally and I don't look down on them. I don't think the meat substitutes are that unhealthy (almost certainly healthier than what they're replacing) but they're expensive and I genuinely enjoy cooking with veggies, beans, tofu, etc. more than just a burger or whatever. I never liked the concept of a chunk of meat being the centerpiece with some sides or vegetables scattered throughout when most food has so much potential flavor. I love that veganism really challenges that dynamic, forcing the chef to create meals that integrate ingredients rather than isolate them.

I haven't tried any burger products but of the meat replacement products we've used at work

Gardein chicken/beef strips suck total ass. They're like a soy/wheat gluten thing maybe trying to imitate seitan but the one time the sous chef tried to make seitan it seemed really different ( and also shitty tbh) and the texture and the taste is just ass. The beef ones are a little beefier, the chicken ones are really meh.

I HAVE however made them taste really good by steaming to soften them, chopping them up, marinating with a vegan chicken stock, and roasting. That with a root beer bbq sauce I make = the last time I made it these children on a school trip came in and ate all of it because they couldn't tell it wasn't meat and I was really mad because I had to make like 3x more of it then I expected to

The impossible meat we've only used as pre made sausages and it's like, okay, it's sausagey

the Beyond beef crumble made out of pea protein has slight texture differences from beef (it's hard to get it to "brown" in the pan, too, like the way it renders out its moisture is weird) but it tastes very beefy, definitely the closest to meat of any meat imitation product I've tried, if I made a "beef chili" with it and didn't tell you you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Also it doesn't have any allergens unless you consider peas to be an allergen

Tastes okay, doesn't hold up as well on the grill and sure doesn't have the same browning and texture. I like a well made beef burger, but black bean burgers slap and grill up much better than the lab meat.

I admittedly haven’t fully cut out Impossible yet myself, but I’ve been leaning into other options far more frequently after learning that they did testing on rats.