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I remember reading the original impressions of the Impossible Foods ground meat and thinking it was just media buzz. I promise you it is not. At Momofuku's Ss
by L_Rahman 9y ago
I remember reading the original impressions of the Impossible Foods ground meat and thinking it was just media buzz.
I promise you it is not.
At Momofuku's Ssam Bar in the East Village of NYC, you can order an off menu item called Spicy Pork Sausage and Rice Cakes. It's not really off the menu - the item has simply been around so long and is so well known to regulars that they left it off to make room for new dishes.
I've had it more times than I count.
At lunch time however, they serve Spicy "Impossible Sausage" and Rice Cakes. The first time I ordered it, I was ready to complain about one of my favorite things ruined by a hyped product.
But then I took my first bite, and it somehow tasted better than the pork sausage version. I've been back many times since and the Impossible Foods version of the dish is often tastier than the pork version.
Let that sink in for a moment. Impossible Foods was able to replace high quality pork sausage served in a beloved dish at one of New York's buzziest restaurants and make the dish better.
The vast majority of ground meat in the American food chain is of lower quality. If Impossible Foods can replace that ground meat at scale, the ramifications are enormous. They will reduce by a huge margin the number of animal lives and quantity of CO2 necessary to feed us.
- acchow 9y agoI tried the Impossible Meats burger - it was nowhere near as tasty as a beef burger. I think it could be improved drastically by just adding a little MSG tho.
- dmoy 9y agoTime to bust out that jar of msg then, or just eat it with seaweed instead of lettuce or something.
- KekDemaga 9y agoI'm thinking a black and blu burger. Most of the flavor comes from the Cajun spice and the blue cheese so all it has to do is get the mouth feel right. It's the burger Turing test.
- mmanfrin 9y agoMost burgers are improved with MSG, it is a miracle salt.
- mrfusion 9y agoAnd msg is generally considered safe these days?
- tptacek 9y agoIt's never not been safe.
- jlebrech 9y agowrong, this is what they used to synthesise MSG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile I believe some MSG is still made with this and causes migraines and other heart issues, it's mostly phased out though, and can cause mixed reactions as the type of MSG isn't labelled, let alone MSG.
- graphitezepp 9y agoYour link has no mention of the subject being directly used to manufacture MSG, and only mention a link to glutamic acid being used for syntheses of it. This is not adequate evidence that Acrylonitrile was ever present in commercial MSG.
- jlebrech 9y agothere are two known methods, acrylonitrile and bacteria as per this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Productio...
- mustacheemperor 9y ago>this and causes migraines and other heart issues Until you can provide a shred of evidence for that I will assume you're just adding a layer of legitimate-sounding abstraction to the same superstition. Toxic precursors =/= toxic end products. This is chemistry, not alchemy.
- killjoywashere 9y agoA friend in LA got my brother and I to try impossible burgers (he's pescatarian, I'm vegawarian): we agreed it was not that great.
- benjaminjackman 9y agoWhat does vegawarian mean?
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoA shibboleth
- jmknoll 9y agoI assumed it was a typo, but apparently its an actual term. Basically vegetarian-friendly. Sounds a bit buzzword-y, but I like the concept. https://www.greenprophet.com/2009/01/vegewarianism/ https://www.greenprophet.com/2009/01/vegewarianism/
- killjoywashere 9y agoI'm aware vegetables are better.
- venantius 9y agoI also had the Impossible burger and was not impressed - to me, it was too greasy, and didn't have any real flavor of its own. I would not order it again for pretty much any reason - I actively disliked eating it.
- mikekchar 9y agoI just want to point out that there are lots of ways to get umami. MSG is just one of them (and not really a great way IMHO). I cooked vegan at home for a long time (I'm not actually an ethical vegan, I just like vegan food). Konbu dashi will give you similar glutamate profiles, but tomatoes, fermented products like shoyu and miso, etc are simple ways to boost the umami as well. Usually the biggest trick in good vegan food is to understand how to balance all of the flavours. Meat based cooking has so many savoury flavours, and if you simply cut out the meat, you end up with overly sweet/sour dishes. They lack depth. If you're designing a dish and you are waiting until the end to figure out how to get the umami in (for example, by adding MSG), then you're really not going to succeed most of the time IMHO. If I want a savoury dish, umami is where I start. Having said that, I've never made a vegan burger style dish that I've thought was particularly good. I've had some excellent vegan dishes like that at restaurants and I've always wondered how they did it. Since MSG triggers migraines in me, I'm pretty sure it wasn't MSG :-)
- mustacheemperor 9y agoMSG consumption has never been linked to physical symptoms in a double blind test.[0] It's an abundantly occurring natural amino acid. Kombu dashi is one of the foods where the flavor of MSG was originally identified as umami because it contains MSG. [0]http://www.fda.gov/food/ingredientspackaginglabeling/foodadditivesingredients/ucm328728.htm http://www.fda.gov/food/ingredientspackaginglabeling/foodadd...
- jlebrech 9y agoMSG can be made using toxic chemicals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile
- chadcmulligan 9y agoI make a black bean / brown rice / sweet potato with cumin vege burger that tastes pretty good
- dEnigma 9y agoMost of the things you list as MSG alternatives actually contain MSG; like tomatoes, konbu dashi, and many fermented products.
- billyshih 9y agoDo they still offer the sausage? I'd love to try it when I visit NYC.
- leovander 9y agoI think the way it breaks a part has always made me lean towards it being served as a bbq pulled pork slider. I didn't think about how it would taste as a "sausage".
- codq 9y agoI live literally a block away from Ssam bar--I'll be going in tomorrow for lunch to try this out. Thanks for the tip!
- L_Rahman 9y agoI'm afraid they've taken the Impossible Foods version off the menu :( They do they same pork version at both lunch and dinner now. I'll ask why they switched next time I stop by. Aside: I too live very close to Ssam Bar and would be happy to get a coffee in the neighborhood. If you're interested, contact info is in my profile.
- shanev 9y agoI too live nearby and would love to try the non-processed food version.
- tptacek 9y agoThis is a neat comment, but as someone who's been to a couple different Momofuku places (incl. Ssam Bar) but never had that dish: how heavily spiced is it? The dish is inspired (simultaneously) by Mapo Tofu and Bolognese --- it's supposed to literally be Ssam Bar's take on Mapo Tofu --- which suggests to me that the quality of the pork is probably not all that important to the overall dish. A good hamburger, on the other hand, relies almost entirely on the flavor of the beef. There's an informal rule in cooking about how the simpler a dish is, the better your ingredients and technique have to be, because there's nothing to hide behind.
- jjeaff 9y agoThat really depends on the type of burger. Occasionally, I enjoy a good In n Out Burger. I don't expect their meat quality is particularly good. "Patty melt" style burgers are generally less reliant on meat quality as long as you can get a good, crunchy, umami seat on the thin mean patty or patties. I suspect the thicker higher end style burgers would be more reliant on the quality of the beef. However, for economic reasons, they are probably the necessary target of impossible meat until they reach a scale large enough to compete with cheap beef.
- fragmede 9y agoIn-n-Out burger patties are never frozen and the chain has a number of high-profile chefs as fans. Their beef may be ground and it's fast food, but McDonalds it ain't.
- schitzapplebits 9y agoFreezing isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for burger patties with a good amount of fat. I'd rather have that than something that's been sitting around in the fridge for too long. As long as it's frozen very quickly and defrosted properly, freezing is fine. In-N-Out meat is pretty good; it's just super thin. McDonald's is not good, but believe me, if McDonald's had a good burger patty, and if they wanted to freeze it, it wouldn't be any worse for it. On the other side of things, In-N-Out doesn't freeze their fries, and they're much worse than the frozen fries from places like McDonald's or Shake Shack's crinkle-cut fries, and it's specifically because they don't do the fry-freeze-refry process critically important for great fries.
- shanev 9y agoHow do you know for that sure it will reduce the number of animal lives and reduce CO2? Farming the plants needed to produce this fake meat takes up land, potentially (and most likely) more land needed to produce equal amounts of meat. Unless they are running a completely solar operation and managing their farms using a system of rotational grazing that sequesters CO2, they most certainly are emitting it. I see this as only mildly better than CAFOs. Employing holistic management techniques is still the best, and unfortunately, under appreciated way to produce meat in an ethical, sustainable way that also generates new fertile soil and sequesters carbon/methane as a side effect.
- Taek 9y agoAre you sure? Cows eat plants. The footprint from cows is largely due to the fact that you need 14 pounds of grain per pound of cow, if I remember correctly. Unless these burgers are somehow taking 14 pounds of grain to produce per pound of burger, I think we're in a better place. That said, eliminating cows I still don't think will help the environment. That freed up land will be bought and used for some other purpose. It's natural capitalism. If you want to fix the environment, you need heavy penalities / taxes for nonsustainable resource usage. That's the only way.
- shanev 9y agoCows don't need grain. Grain feeding is part of industrial meat production that is highly detrimental to the environment. Feeding cows grass (and rotating them) though has the total opposite effect. It creates soil that can hold more water and sequester carbon. So it eliminates the need for grain production because cows simply eat grass while naturally fertilizing it. Huge fan of a carbon tax.
- cropsieboss 9y agoNo way anyone can feed cows on grass alone if you want to earn big bucks or feed 200M their daily beef steak.
- 9y ago
- bamboozled 9y agoWhen visiting Europe I had a similar experience with "Seitan" [1] based sausages. I quickly realised that what I like most about sausages isn't really the animal fat / flesh, it's the wheat, barley and or other spices + salt fried in oil that I enjoy. I should also add the texture which was easily reproduced with Seitan. Also I found Seitan cheese burgers to be really, really good. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_gluten_(food) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_gluten_(food)
- mtanski 9y agoI've felt like vegetarian hot dogs tasted the same (indistinguishable) or better as regular hot dogs for a while now. I'm a little more skeptical of "pork" substitutes simply because lard makes everything taste better. Split pea soup vs split pea soup with coppa. Regular pie crust vs lard crust. Plain pizza vs with prosciutto. Risotto vs risotto w pork fat (or goose fat). For all of these there's no contest (for me).