Fake Meat Smackdown: Impossible Burger Vs. Beyond Burger

I ate a lot of veggie burgers in the day.

I was a vegetarian for five years before I decided that it would be much easier to be the person who eats meat “occasionally” – which these days usually includes meat served in someone else’s house, or meat ordered in a restaurant. … when the only vegetarian option is either a bunch of carbs or a slice of mushrooms. (I also make exceptions for hand-dipped corn dogs because I grew up in the Midwest, although last year I had a hand-soaked cornmeal cheese stick, which was a very preferred option.)

The last time I ate a real burger, simply because I wanted to remember what they tasted like, I spent the entire night making my way to and from the toilet.

This is how I understand why products like the Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger are needed. We live in a world where we eat more meat than can be produced using sustainable methods. A good meat substitute can help us reduce our consumption of animal meat and thereby mitigate some of the damage the meat industry is currently doing to our planet.

We also live in a world where many people are vegetarians for ethical or cultural reasons, or – in my case – because they had read “Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan and “Animal nutrition” Jonathan Safran Foer and stopped eating meat for five years. (I deliberately avoid Pollan’s new stuff because I don’t want to be tempted to take a microdose .)

But, most importantly , we live in a world where burgers are delicious. This is why I tried that real burger last year, instead of settling for another dry beige patty, where you can see, for example, a strip of carrots clinging to a piece of pinto beans.

This is why I tried both Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger. If I could enjoy a non-meat product that tastes like meat, I would never eat another hamburger again.

To keep the experiment as standardized as possible, I ordered my Impossible and Beyond Burgers at local (non-chain) restaurants, photographed them side by side, and ate half of each burger in one meal. (I also had a side of hand-soaked mozzarella sticks, but I don’t think they had any impact on the experiment.)

Here’s how they compared.

Impossible burger

I ordered my Impossible Burger Without Onions because I am one of those people for whom the crunching of raw onions tastes equivalent to nails on a chalkboard, but I think the person taking my order misunderstood because my hamburger came without anything – no salad, no tomatoes, no marinade, no mayonnaise, no mustard, no ketchup. I got a piece of cheese.

The cake itself was thin and gray and looked like it had recently been taken out of a plastic wrap; You could not mistake it for something human made.

(The bun was also clearly shaken out of the plastic bag, although the burger is not to blame.)

Cut in half, the Impossible Burger interior looked much more like a hamburger than I expected – a serial burger, of course, but by its appearance you cannot identify it as a non-meat product.

Not to taste.

Dear readers, this thing tasted like meat .

Or, as the Impossible Burger put it , “cow meat.”

It didn’t just taste like meat (cow). There was a meaty sensation in my mouth . Not that hand-ground hamburger that’s blackened from the grill on the outside and big enough to leave a lump in your stomach, but that fast food hamburger that disappears when you chew on it, leaving nothing but the satisfaction of eating a hamburger. behind.

I would definitely eat it again. In fact, I already want another one.

Beyond the Burger

My Beyond Burger looked like a veggie burger. It was clearly a veggie burger that tried really hard, was covered and served in a restaurant that cared a lot about #aesthetics (oats dotted with a bun, tiny arugula leaves instead of a plate of iceberg), but … well, this burger was red. Like Impossible Burger, this washer-shaped patty was pushed out of the plastic compartment; unlike The Impossible Burger, at first glance, one could tell that no cows were involved.

Cut in half, Beyond Burger looked even more disturbing; the inner pellets could mean meat if you were willing to squint, but the color suggested the meat was still raw. According to Beyond Burger , this “red meat appearance” comes from beets; according to other observers , some patties literally bleed . (Mine is not.)

However, I expected Beyond Burger to be more pleasant to me than Impossible Burger, simply because it looked like a great product in the overall presentation. The pie is thicker. The bun consisted of several grains. They ditched onions, but did not forget to add other vegetables as well.

I really liked my Beyond Burger.

I would eat it again.

But it didn’t taste like meat.

At best, Beyond Burger tastes like a veggie burger in a meat suit. This isn’t one of those veggie burgers that spot bean halves or mushroom slices; its texture and mouthfeel are comparable to the real meat hamburger you can get from breweries that prefer to use arugula instead of iceberg.

It’s very, very hard.

But something is missing.

On the other hand, Beyond Burger provided a more complex food experience than the Impossible Burger. This isn’t a burger that melts in your mouth, giving you enough room to squeeze in the handful of fries you just dipped into your milkshake. Beyond Burger is a chewy burger. Delicious. Maybe lingered while you and your friends had a beer or three on the patio.

I’m not the only one to notice that out of the top two players in the fake meat market, Impossible has created a slightly better replacement. As Chris Yip reports at Engadget :

Beyond was the first in grocery stores, the first to sell multiple meat products, and the first on the Nasdaq. But the “Impossible” may have more “soft power” based on something simpler: it tastes more like animal flesh.

However, I would recommend that you try both of them and decide for yourself which one you like best. After all, Beyond and Impossible share the same goal: to convince consumers to eat less meat overall.

So go ahead and order the faux meat burger. I bet you will love it enough that you will want to eat another one.

Beyond versus the Impossible: Breakdown of Statistics

Calories

Outside: 270

Impossible: 240

Protein gram:

Outside : 20

Impossible : 19

The main source of protein

Beyond : peas

Impossible : soy

Other Important Ingredients:

Besides : beet juice extract.

Impossible : heme, which in The Impossible is described as “an iron-containing molecule necessary for life.” It is this soy-derived “animal heme” heme that gives the burger its true meaty flavor.

Available on:

Beyond : Major grocery chains, major restaurant chains including TGIFridays, Carl’s Jr, and Del Taco ( see full list here ).

Impossible : More than 5,000 restaurants around the world ( here’s how to find the closest to you ) will hit grocery stores later this year.