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I've tried plant based burgers multiple times and it's just not the same. The first time I had an "impossible burger", I didn't actually know it was fake meat,

I've tried plant based burgers multiple times and it's just not the same. The first time I had an "impossible burger", I didn't actually know it was fake meat, I just assumed it was the name of the burger at the time, I thought it was horrible. I had a different shops "impossible" burger few years later and it was far from horrible, but just doesn't have the same impact as a good burger. Edit: Either it's juicy and the texture isn't right, or the texture is right but it isn't juicy, or the flavour isn't there. It just doesn't taste real enough, in some ways its SO close... /end edit. Wife and I tried some of the beyond meat from the super market and that was once... never again, it was not good, any of it. Its sometimes /very/ salty, even if I don't add salt... (as a side note I donno if it's changed but it's more expensive to buy beyond meat than it is to buy real meat)

etrautmann 4y ago
Weird, not my experience at all. I prefer the alternatives now and for anything requiring ground beef in a sauce it’s indistinguishable
- naravara 4y ago
  Ground meat in a sauce is actually the only situation where it is easily distinguishable for me. The texture doesn’t feel right. It ends up rubbery, kind of like overcooked fish. And it doesn’t impart the same kind of umami depth of flavor. I end up having to supplement with bouillon instead, but then it gets a little too salty.
  - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
    You don't have to use bouillon, though. There are lots of ways to increase umami: Soy sauce, tomato paste, and ground mushroom powder all work out well, and the last two are low-to-no salt.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Most people do such an awful job of cooking ground beef, just making a gray mush, I could see how the fake stuff wouldn’t be any worse.
thret 4y ago
Huh, tried the impossible burger and a normal one side by side, and I preferred the impossible burger. I still think it's the best thing on their menu. So I think the problem is not the taste, it's simply that people who eat healthy or vegan don't go to burger king in the first place.
- koheripbal 4y ago
  When I think "burger", I think of one I make on my grill, which is delicious, not a McDs or BK burger. If you compare it to garbage fast food, then of course the impossible burger will be better.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Then you're discussing pretty minor differences. Plenty of people (a billion a day?) enjoy fast food burgers. This seems like just bragging about having really good taste.
    - stickfigure 4y ago
      I suspect that the core audience for plant-based burgers generally tries to avoid fast food anyway.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Which was why it was amusing how much marketing dollars were spent getting it into fast food locations (where it inevitably was a “buy once and never again” for the vast majority of those who even bothered to try it).
      - lupire 4y ago
        Why? What does "not torturing animals" have to do with "eating healthy food", aside from "both are goods"? One is an ethical position, and the other is self care, which aren't particularly correlated, except that both require self-control.
    - 4y ago
PaulHoule 4y ago
Ecological engineer Howard Odum developed a system for tracing back the energy inputs into something back to sunlight which revolved around ‘embodied energy’ or emergy. When you analyze something you first do the components that you have an analysis of (fuels, …) and then for what is left over you multiply the dollar cost by a ratio representing the emergy/dollar ratio for the economy. A consequence of that is that something expensive is probably unecological because money is a license to use resources and trash the environment.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  You need to add in the externalities that aren't being paid for, too, which can vary significantly between different kinds of farming.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Odum's system has numerous problems. One is that the "transformity" (ratio of emergy to energy) is path dependent. One ear of corn might have been produced with more or less water or fertilizer, both of which contain more emergy than the sunlight that falls on it. Another is that you can't trace all energy to "the" sun or at least not our sun. The energy of Thorium and Uranium in the Earth's crust probably came from two other stars that became neutron stars and crashed into each other. Emergy accounting does a good job of accounting for externalities of consumption (e.g. trace back water use in Central Valley agriculture to Shasta Lake) but doesn't do a good job of accounting for the production of noxious influences. The latter may be intractable, may really be the death of environmental accounting, because instead of producing one number for a product you produce numerous numbers. How can you compare 1 g of tetraethyl lead in the air to 1 ton of CO2? A megacurie of Krypton 85 to a kilogram of PFAS? There is a field of "multiobjective optimization" that considers these problems but leaves as many questions as answers in that different people are going to see the trade-offs differently. (It reminds me of the doomed project where I was working with some people to create an "NQ" score for the nutritional value of food and we couldn't get consensus on how to combine factors. For instance it is good to eat riboflavin but you can't give nutritional yeast, which colors your urine bright yellow with riboflavin, a score proportional to how much riboflavin it has. It wasn't clear to us if it really made sense to evaluate individual foods... You really need to eat protein/Vitamin C/Zinc if you haven't had any today, you don't need to if you have. We weren't even sure you could assign it to foods w/o reference to portion size... One scoop of ice cream is not so bad but the whole box is something different.)
sudden_dystopia 4y ago
It’s not just the taste and texture, the nutritional profile is worse than actual meat for my dietary needs.
manfre 4y ago
The plant based meat alternatives are more expensive. It's a newer, smaller scale manufacturing process and regular meat benefits from US agricultural subsidies. I switched from sirloin burgers (~$1.30/patty) to beyond burgers (~$2/patty). I found the taste and texture of Beyond Burgers to be better than Impossible burgers, but neither is as good as the sirloin burgers. Cooking them on a smoker narrows the flavor gap. Beyond burgers are lower fat and 100 calories less per patty, the primary reason I made the substitution and one of reasons I haven't switched back. General comment about salt: packaged foods in the US are overloaded with salt and your doctor will be happier if you never add salt to what's on your plate.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  In Singapore I used to buy 4x wagyu beef burger Pattie’s. Cost around $12 sgd but they were amazing. I’ll admit tho if we compare fast food then I don’t really mind impossible meat. Fast food burgers are very soso.
code_runner 4y ago
I’ve yet to try an impossible burger but one of the best burgers I’ve ever had was a veggie burger patty made in house at a little brewery near me. Seasonings and texture etc were perfect. Wasn’t trying to be a burger but trying to be a very good veggie patty and succeeded.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Veggie pattys are great and standard faire in India. I agree, I’d just like a good veggie burger sometime. Doesn’t need ultra processing.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  I once accidentally ordered a veggie burger. It was called a "garden burger" on the menu and I naively assumed it was a regular burger with vegetables on it. When I got it I immediately recognized my error, but ate it anyway and it was fine. Not what I wanted, but wholly inoffensive. Years later I tried an impossible whopper, and unlike the veggie burger it was actually vile. The taste and texture were bizarre, not like meat but neither like vegetable. It tasted like something that came out of a chemistry lab, not a kitchen. Elsewhere in this thread I see people suggesting that real meat be taxed, or subsidies removed, or some other form of government action to twist people's arms into eating a meat substitute. My advise to those commenters is this: Do it with traditional veggie patties and the general public might forgive you. Do it with these new wave of psuedo-meats and it will make people hate vegans with 10x more passion than they already do.
  - lupire 4y ago
    A regular whopper is also vile, though.
iforgotpassword 4y ago
The first time I had a good vegetarian burger was when it wasn't trying to imitate the real thing. As others already commented, I also think trying to engineer a schnitzel from tofu and whatnot that tastes and feels like the original is just the wrong approach. Vegan cheese, like wtf, I was curious and tried it once; that was so bad I had to throw away that stuff. But I digress. The burger I liked had a patty made from broccoli and just had its own distinct texture and taste. Same goes for tofu. The Asian cuisines have created dozens of great recipes over decades if not centuries that involve tofu, but here people completely ignore all that and try to make tofu look, feel and taste like sausages, schnitzel, and mostly fail at it.
pithon 4y ago
I was making an America Goulash recipe once, and thought I'd give the beyond burger or whatever a try; it wasn't patties but was jut a pound of ground "beef." It didn't brown or cook up correctly; it smelled awful and perfumed the whole house. I made the recipe and it was straight up gross. We threw it all away.
graton 4y ago
I had the same experience. I have tried both the impossible and beyond meat burgers and ended up not being able to finish them as I really didn't like the taste. I had high hopes because I had watched these TV segments where they were eating them and saying how it tastes like a burger. But not for me.
Accacin 4y ago
Sorry if I come across as a little rude here, but, it's never going to be the same. Never, ever. The problem is people keep using it as an excuse now, "well I'd be vegan if there was fake meat that tasted like the real deal". At some point people are just going to have to admit either they're selfish and want to keep eating meat, or they really do want to stop eating meat and just do it. It's just a human thing to try and find excuses.. I do it with going to the gym and going swimming more. Also, as a side note. If you don't buy meat OR fake meat, it's cheaper. There are hundreds of cuisines around the world that don't depend on meat. Sorry but it does wind me up the mental gymnastics people do to justify continuing doing something they know it bad.

etrautmann 4y ago

Weird, not my experience at all. I prefer the alternatives now and for anything requiring ground beef in a sauce it’s indistinguishable

naravara 4y ago
Ground meat in a sauce is actually the only situation where it is easily distinguishable for me. The texture doesn’t feel right. It ends up rubbery, kind of like overcooked fish. And it doesn’t impart the same kind of umami depth of flavor. I end up having to supplement with bouillon instead, but then it gets a little too salty.
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  You don't have to use bouillon, though. There are lots of ways to increase umami: Soy sauce, tomato paste, and ground mushroom powder all work out well, and the last two are low-to-no salt.
rootusrootus 4y ago
Most people do such an awful job of cooking ground beef, just making a gray mush, I could see how the fake stuff wouldn’t be any worse.

thret 4y ago

Huh, tried the impossible burger and a normal one side by side, and I preferred the impossible burger. I still think it's the best thing on their menu. So I think the problem is not the taste, it's simply that people who eat healthy or vegan don't go to burger king in the first place.

koheripbal 4y ago
When I think "burger", I think of one I make on my grill, which is delicious, not a McDs or BK burger. If you compare it to garbage fast food, then of course the impossible burger will be better.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Then you're discussing pretty minor differences. Plenty of people (a billion a day?) enjoy fast food burgers. This seems like just bragging about having really good taste.
  - stickfigure 4y ago
    I suspect that the core audience for plant-based burgers generally tries to avoid fast food anyway.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Which was why it was amusing how much marketing dollars were spent getting it into fast food locations (where it inevitably was a “buy once and never again” for the vast majority of those who even bothered to try it).
    - lupire 4y ago
      Why? What does "not torturing animals" have to do with "eating healthy food", aside from "both are goods"? One is an ethical position, and the other is self care, which aren't particularly correlated, except that both require self-control.
  - 4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago

Ecological engineer Howard Odum developed a system for tracing back the energy inputs into something back to sunlight which revolved around ‘embodied energy’ or emergy. When you analyze something you first do the components that you have an analysis of (fuels, …) and then for what is left over you multiply the dollar cost by a ratio representing the emergy/dollar ratio for the economy. A consequence of that is that something expensive is probably unecological because money is a license to use resources and trash the environment.

Dylan16807 4y ago
You need to add in the externalities that aren't being paid for, too, which can vary significantly between different kinds of farming.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Odum's system has numerous problems. One is that the "transformity" (ratio of emergy to energy) is path dependent. One ear of corn might have been produced with more or less water or fertilizer, both of which contain more emergy than the sunlight that falls on it. Another is that you can't trace all energy to "the" sun or at least not our sun. The energy of Thorium and Uranium in the Earth's crust probably came from two other stars that became neutron stars and crashed into each other. Emergy accounting does a good job of accounting for externalities of consumption (e.g. trace back water use in Central Valley agriculture to Shasta Lake) but doesn't do a good job of accounting for the production of noxious influences. The latter may be intractable, may really be the death of environmental accounting, because instead of producing one number for a product you produce numerous numbers. How can you compare 1 g of tetraethyl lead in the air to 1 ton of CO2? A megacurie of Krypton 85 to a kilogram of PFAS? There is a field of "multiobjective optimization" that considers these problems but leaves as many questions as answers in that different people are going to see the trade-offs differently. (It reminds me of the doomed project where I was working with some people to create an "NQ" score for the nutritional value of food and we couldn't get consensus on how to combine factors. For instance it is good to eat riboflavin but you can't give nutritional yeast, which colors your urine bright yellow with riboflavin, a score proportional to how much riboflavin it has. It wasn't clear to us if it really made sense to evaluate individual foods... You really need to eat protein/Vitamin C/Zinc if you haven't had any today, you don't need to if you have. We weren't even sure you could assign it to foods w/o reference to portion size... One scoop of ice cream is not so bad but the whole box is something different.)

sudden_dystopia 4y ago

It’s not just the taste and texture, the nutritional profile is worse than actual meat for my dietary needs.

manfre 4y ago

The plant based meat alternatives are more expensive. It's a newer, smaller scale manufacturing process and regular meat benefits from US agricultural subsidies. I switched from sirloin burgers (~$1.30/patty) to beyond burgers (~$2/patty). I found the taste and texture of Beyond Burgers to be better than Impossible burgers, but neither is as good as the sirloin burgers. Cooking them on a smoker narrows the flavor gap. Beyond burgers are lower fat and 100 calories less per patty, the primary reason I made the substitution and one of reasons I haven't switched back. General comment about salt: packaged foods in the US are overloaded with salt and your doctor will be happier if you never add salt to what's on your plate.

philliphaydon 4y ago
In Singapore I used to buy 4x wagyu beef burger Pattie’s. Cost around $12 sgd but they were amazing. I’ll admit tho if we compare fast food then I don’t really mind impossible meat. Fast food burgers are very soso.

code_runner 4y ago

I’ve yet to try an impossible burger but one of the best burgers I’ve ever had was a veggie burger patty made in house at a little brewery near me. Seasonings and texture etc were perfect. Wasn’t trying to be a burger but trying to be a very good veggie patty and succeeded.

dr_dshiv 4y ago
Veggie pattys are great and standard faire in India. I agree, I’d just like a good veggie burger sometime. Doesn’t need ultra processing.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
I once accidentally ordered a veggie burger. It was called a "garden burger" on the menu and I naively assumed it was a regular burger with vegetables on it. When I got it I immediately recognized my error, but ate it anyway and it was fine. Not what I wanted, but wholly inoffensive. Years later I tried an impossible whopper, and unlike the veggie burger it was actually vile. The taste and texture were bizarre, not like meat but neither like vegetable. It tasted like something that came out of a chemistry lab, not a kitchen. Elsewhere in this thread I see people suggesting that real meat be taxed, or subsidies removed, or some other form of government action to twist people's arms into eating a meat substitute. My advise to those commenters is this: Do it with traditional veggie patties and the general public might forgive you. Do it with these new wave of psuedo-meats and it will make people hate vegans with 10x more passion than they already do.
- lupire 4y ago
  A regular whopper is also vile, though.

iforgotpassword 4y ago

The first time I had a good vegetarian burger was when it wasn't trying to imitate the real thing. As others already commented, I also think trying to engineer a schnitzel from tofu and whatnot that tastes and feels like the original is just the wrong approach. Vegan cheese, like wtf, I was curious and tried it once; that was so bad I had to throw away that stuff. But I digress. The burger I liked had a patty made from broccoli and just had its own distinct texture and taste. Same goes for tofu. The Asian cuisines have created dozens of great recipes over decades if not centuries that involve tofu, but here people completely ignore all that and try to make tofu look, feel and taste like sausages, schnitzel, and mostly fail at it.

pithon 4y ago

I was making an America Goulash recipe once, and thought I'd give the beyond burger or whatever a try; it wasn't patties but was jut a pound of ground "beef." It didn't brown or cook up correctly; it smelled awful and perfumed the whole house. I made the recipe and it was straight up gross. We threw it all away.

graton 4y ago

I had the same experience. I have tried both the impossible and beyond meat burgers and ended up not being able to finish them as I really didn't like the taste. I had high hopes because I had watched these TV segments where they were eating them and saying how it tastes like a burger. But not for me.

Accacin 4y ago

Sorry if I come across as a little rude here, but, it's never going to be the same. Never, ever. The problem is people keep using it as an excuse now, "well I'd be vegan if there was fake meat that tasted like the real deal". At some point people are just going to have to admit either they're selfish and want to keep eating meat, or they really do want to stop eating meat and just do it. It's just a human thing to try and find excuses.. I do it with going to the gym and going swimming more. Also, as a side note. If you don't buy meat OR fake meat, it's cheaper. There are hundreds of cuisines around the world that don't depend on meat. Sorry but it does wind me up the mental gymnastics people do to justify continuing doing something they know it bad.