>One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus.
This upsets me because as a vegetarian the last thing I want is to be reminded of what meat tastes like. Who exactly is this for? Because the last I heard it was being marketed primarily at meat eaters.
I’m a meat eater and I would love to find a faux ground beef or faux ground pork that I can use in the kitchen exactly the way I use beef/pork in my recipes. I would prefer such a food if it was similarly priced to animal, but more sustainable, because I would rather be vegetarian but not to the degree that I need to give up my favorite recipes. I need it to provide essential umami, salt, fat, flavor. Often vegetarian recipes suggest minced mushrooms for this purpose but maillard browned pork bits hit different. My favorite recipe uses something like 80g of ground pork and 540g of soft tofu. Clearly I’m not eating the pork because I prefer meat protein! But making the dish without the pork leaves it tasting a bit hollow. Adding a bit more MSG helps sometimes but isn’t a general fix.
(Note that beyond or impossible might fit the bill, but availability has been so inconsistent here for the more “raw” ground-X products versus patties/sausages that I haven’t gotten to try it. I don’t care much about burgers.)
I am omnivorous, but I have a sibling who is vegan. When we were both in the Bay Area, Golden Era ( https://www.goldeneravegan.com ) was a place that we found that... wasn't bad.
This was quite a while back but the first time we went in and looked at the menu the question of "is all of this vegan except for these two items with an asterisk?" (It was the 'classic' Chinese style menu with about 200 things on it with numbers to identify them).
I found the "drumsticks" and the pot stickers to be quite good. For an entree, I would have the Mongolian (now the 'Spicy Mongolian Delight') which was again quite good. The only problem with eating there is on the drive back home I'd have a hankering for some beef jerky.
We encountered that with a vegetarian restaurant in Mountain View (or was it Palo Alto? somewhere on El Camino Real) that had vegetarian food... but it was entirely boring without much flavor, texture, or... spirit. It was a bowl of bland vegetarian chili... with kale. No spices from onions, or garlic or anything really interesting. It was brown and green.
And so, that's what made Golden Era somehow different - it had flavor and did a lot of work with the sauces to make them interesting and desirable.
This is interesting. There's a few successful "vegetarian/vegan" places in my area, but they're all basically some variant of Chinese food and are from moderately to pretty good. There's also a few Indian places, but they don't really seem to register with the local vegetarian population as such, but at least can be quite good if you know where to look and have the usual amounts of flavor that Indian food tends to have.
However, there's a couple "Western" vegetarian/vegan joints in my immediate area that I've tried a couple of times. To be fair you get lots of food for the money, but both places produce a product that really is quite flavorless -- even with pretty different menus. Things like extra spicy vegan chili go down with the flavor profile of water, other dishes taste like salad baked in an oven, it's really dreadful shit. Yelp reviews for both places? 4+ stars. shrug
They make fake ground beef in a number of brands now and they all taste pretty similar once you season it to what the dish would be with meat. Imo the hard part is actually cooking the stuff. Theres no fat to render out to keep it from sticking to the pan really so you have to add your own, which it absorbs like a sponge because its so dry. In the end theres no way the nutrition facts are reflecting the final meal with it taking on so much oil in the pan.
Where I live in Australia, Coles has a vegan mince option that is pretty excellent. It requires longer to cook though, but it works brilliantly in chilli and pasta. $7.50 AUD for half a kilogram (and $4-5 on special), which is close enough to the price (and sometimes cheaper!) for real beef mince that I'm happy to use it regularly (as a vegan). It doesn't taste identical, but its close enough that my vegan partner who has been vegan for over a decade dislikes the smell haha
The trick is you must add a fair bit of olive oil to the pan, as it does not have the same fat content actual mince does. Once you do, it tastes brilliant in the dishes I'd use it for, with the seasoning and such we use.
Everything is of course flavour preference but I found that liquid smoke is a great add-on that makes much veggie food taste good to meat eaters; it takes care of the smokey/charred flavour that you get using ham or frying your meat before you add other things.
And for umami tomato (fresh/canned & condensed) works wonders.
Try tempah or mushrooms. (You might want to pan fry the mushroom first.) You could also try shelled edamame.
They aren't a one-to-one replacement for meat, but even when I've tried the impossible or beyond meat replacements, I find they taste like tofu instead of real meat.
Seitan is also nice for a ground sausage type texture.
It’s unfortunately not as appealing to many because seitan is wheat gluten. But it’s definitely worth trying; Chinese Buddhists haven’t been eating it since the sixth century on a whim.
The only tempeh I like personally is when we make our own using the Okara left over from making our own tofu -- that tastes fantastic fresh. I've never enjoyed eating the store bought stuff, even from the amazing Asian grocery stores here.
Meat from all kinds of animals is delicious. I'm a die-hard omnivore, but don't mind going sans meat for a few meals if the food tastes good -- think more "bear" diet than obligate carnivorous "T-Rex".
Intersect those two sets of food products and you get exactly who this is for.
Actually even more particularly, it's for food products where the absolute quality of the meat, and the way in which it is cooked, doesn't really matter all that much ... burgers, sausages, chicken nuggets, etc.
The problem really with these products is that the prices are absolutely hilariously ridiculous. If I could walk into a Burger King tomorrow, have no meat-based burgers and only Impossible burgers, but all the prices were 20% lower, I would eat...at least 20% more Burger King. Maybe more.
But right now the prices for an Impossible Whopper can be 20% more than the one made from an animal raised at great expense.
Beyond Meat's real problem is that it's not as convincing of a meat substitute as an Impossible Burger, leaving it deep in the uncanny valley while an Impossible product can often times be imperceptibly the same as a low quality fast food burger patty.
This upsets me because as a vegetarian the last thing I want is to be reminded of what meat tastes like. Who exactly is this for? Because the last I heard it was being marketed primarily at meat eaters.