I can’t be the only one who’s done this, so I do not pretend that what follows is definitive. However, I am a decent cook, and I quietly pride myself on something close to what insecure musicians brag about when claiming “perfect pitch” – for me, it’s taste. What’s more, I am genome biologist, and a microbiologist and I know precisely how the sausage is being made.
To wit, today, a head to head three-way competition between ground beef, Beyond beef and Impossible burger. And to make the contest fair, the real beef was ground chuck, which in my experience, is the beefiest of ground beef. Sure, yes you could get beefier with ground shank or ground short rib, but it would be sacrilege to grind either cut.
The Opening
The fresh ground chuck smelled almost of nothing. Just a faint whiff of iron, perhaps. And this is reassuring. Generally you don’t want your fresh ground beef to smell of much right out of the fridge. The Beyond had a distinct vegetable note, not unpleasant, but not beefy, almost a citrus overlay. It smelled quite fresh. And that is the contrast with the Impossible product. It had a faint funk, like day-old beef… or maybe… just maybe… like that funk you get on dry aged beef! Yes, that’s it! And the reason it’s cognitively out of place is that NO ONE makes a burgers out of expensive dry aged beef!
This was surprising. More than I had thought, or maybe had hoped.
Round One – just salt
I added just a 1/8 teaspoon of salt to each 4 oz portion. Exactly the same for each. And nothing else. I treated each one the same as I would for a slider – nice and thick with a dimple in the middle to help aid evenness of cooking time across the radius (yes this is a thing). They were pan seared in the same cast iron skillet at the same time (using paper towel to prevent mixing of any extruded juices.
On the flip you could easily see the difference between the deep brown crust of the real beef and the reddish caramelized surfaces of the not-beef products. But seriously, in a burger on a bun, no one sees that. So, who cares?
What was obvious, though, was that the Beyond beef had a much higher water content either than real beef or the Impossible alternative. And this matters a lot in terms of cooking. On the one hand, water cannot exceed 100 degrees C, so high water content tends to prevent browning (which requires a higher temp). On the other hand, the interior of the Beyond beef patty was clearly cooking faster than the Impossible one because it was being steamed from the bottom up and the inside out. Water is a fantastic conductor of heat. That’s not always good.
First Blood
After a 2 minute rest, it was time to nosh. The Impossible burger looked closer to the beef burger than the Beyond beef, which had a distinct pinkish hue even when cooked. I believe this is beet root powder that is used for color effect. Neither had the deep dark crust all the way across that I want on a burger to offer first resistance to my teeth.
The Beyond burger tasted like the very best veggie burger I have ever had. It had no notes of black beans or other legumes, nor vital wheat gluten, nor any of the other things I associate with veggie burgers. However… to the extent that it tasted like meat, it was not clear what that meat would be. It did not taste like beef… or lamb… or pork… It tasted, quite a bit like some mixed “meaty” thing you might serve to a well-loved pet. I think I’d rather have a black-bean burger honestly. And this goes to my friend Dianne’s notion that she does not want to eat something that is pretending to be something else. The Beyond beef very much does feel and taste just like it’s trying very hard to taste like beef.
And that’s where the Impossible burger had me stymied.
At first I thought I had picked up and bitten into the wrong slider. Had I not kept track of which was which? So I took a bite of the other third one. And goddammit if the Impossible burger wasn’t more juicy than the chuck! They both tasted very beefy. The Impossible burger might have even had a slight edge over the ground chuck for beefiness. Impossible!
I was blown away.
The internal texture was indistinguishable, and the surface crusting of the Impossible burger, while not on point, was closer to what I got from the sear on the ground chuck. One clear drawback was that the Impossible burger very clearly needs to be salted a lot less than fresh ground chuck. This is going to prove a problem for anyone working with pre-made spice rubs… they will way over-salt the Impossible burger meat.
Meet Mr. Maillard
I let my taste buds chill and my system digest for about 6 hours before the next test. I knew that round two was beyond what Beyond could deliver. Maybe if you do not like the taste of beef and you do not like the taste of veggie burgers, Beyond beef would hit the right mark. But in my opinion, it is not going to get the world to stop eating cows that are farting us into irreversible climate change. It just does not taste good enough.
For this second comparison I made bigger patties so that the interior was certain to be medium-rare. And there is a point to this. Generally speaking it is very risky to order anything other than a medium-to-well-done burger at a restaurant. It would be like ordering chicken medium-rare. There is a higher probability of E. coli in ground beef (unlike an intact steak). But there’s nothing in my microbiologist/parasitologist mind that would have me counsel against a rare to medium-rare burger made from plant material.
Each was a 6-ounce patty. Less salt this time, a splash of Worcestershire, coriander powder and chopped scallions in the mix. After a very, very quick heat of each side, I gave both of them a faint dusting of baking soda before punching to a sear. This increase of the surface pH with baking soda promotes the Maillard reaction. That is the gorgeous browning of proteins and other stuff on the surface of meat. (They use lye to make your bagels and pretzels that brown.) And just look at the result! Be very careful with this or your burger will taste soapy.
And here you are. I defy you to pick out the real burger from the Impossible burger on sight alone.
Trust me that it’s not that much easier to tell them apart even by taste. Again, the Impossible burger tasted a bit saltier even with less salt than was added. I think maybe only a quarter of the salt you would normally season with would be get it right. But it was gorgeous. It was juicy. It was meaty. It was beefy.
Impossibly, my Impossible burger tasted better, and juicier than my fresh ground chuck burger.
How to change the world?
It might be a good luxury-food business model to entice the host(esse)s of Marin County, the Hamptons and the Berkshires to serve up Impossible burgers at 12-bucks-a-pound. But when ground chuck is $6-a-pound and ground pork is $4-a-pound, it will not be The 99% and a shrinking middle class that dictates change.
This isn’t lobster. Ground it-isn’t-beef is not going to disrupt luxury food items. I can get grass-fed beef short ribs for less and make them taste better. Plant based ground meat isn’t going to supplant cheaper ground meat on that price point.
I don’t know what the business model should be domestically, but I am certain that on an international scale, this has the potential to take pressure off of game meat and bush meat in developing countries. The fundamental process for making Impossible burgers is fermentation. Every country no matter how poor, has a brewery. Not a huge burden for technology transfer.
This could be a way to provide inexpensive high quality protein to people in a manner that they would prefer over, for example, impossible to chew bat sinew. Let’s face it, a burger, like filet mignon, is great for people with bad teeth.
I have seen it in so many places… malnutrition is not having not enough to eat, it’s having not enough protein to eat. The result of which is pressure on fisheries and wild animal populations.
I’d like to think that this, like Golden Rice, is the way we use genomics to fix something that is truly broken.