Meet the meatless Impossible Burger: A veggie burger that bleeds like beef

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Meet the meatless Impossible Burger: A veggie burger that bleeds like beef
BYJEANETTE SETTEMBRE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Tuesday, July 26, 2016, 5:51 PM

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Meet the meatless Impossible Burger
NY Daily News

The impossible burger is a patty worth root-ing for

Daily Newser Jeanette Settembre gets a first taste of the Impossible Burger.
(GO NAKAMURA/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)
Brown created the faux meat in a California lab five years ago. New Yorkers will be able to sample his invention at chef Chang’s Chelsea outpost starting Wednesday.

"It's something I knew I had to get behind," said Chang.

His burger is topped with lettuce, tomato, pickles and special sauce served on a potato bun with or without cheese.

David Chang, left, and Impossible Foods founder Patrick Brown, right. The meatless burgers will be served at Chang's Momofuku Nishi.
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Of course it comes with a side of French fries for $12.

Theater District’s best reasonably priced lunches are found here

While skeptics might roll their eyes at yet another veggie burger on the market, what takes this meatless marvel to the next level is a crucial ingredient called heme.

The iron-containing protein molecule is usually found in animals and is what gives meat its pink color. Other key ingredients are water, wheat, protein, coconut oil, potato protein, soy protein and “natural flavors."

Heme is the key ingredient that makes this meatless burger bleed like beef.
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While the Impossible Burger doesn’t truly achieve beef-level taste, the patty does live up to its hype. It has crispy edges and is cooked medium with a pink interior. The texture is slightly more delicate than beef, but doesn't fall apart when you bite into it. It tastes reminiscent of a Shake Shack Burger with a more intense nutty flavor.

In terms of nutrition, the patty contains more protein, less fat and fewer calories than a burger made with 80% lean meat and 20% fat. There's no cholesterol, hormones or antibiotics.

 

[MASTERBAKER]

This $80 million veggie burger is not very good
BySteve Cuozzo

July 26, 2016|4:28pm

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The Impossible Burger is completely meatless.Photo: Annie Wermiel
The Impossible Burger — a hotly awaited, laboratory-created, all-plant product meant to look, taste and smell like beef and even ooze “blood” — was unveiled Tuesday by its biochemist creator Patrick O. Brown and superchef David Chang.

It’s taken Brown’sImpossible Foodslab five years and $80 million — $80 million — to turn out a burger I wouldn’t pay 80 cents for. And I definitely wouldn’t pay $12 for it, which is how much it will go for atMomofuku Nishi, Chang’s Chelsea restaurant that will start serving the burger on Wednesday.

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Steve Cuozzo is unimpressed by the Impossible Burger.Photo: Annie Wermiel
The Impossible Burger promises to wean a nation of carnivores off ground beef for the pleasures of wheat, potato protein, coconut oil, ever popular xanthan gum and a mysterious substance called heme.

The end result of a five-year, Manhattan Project-like crusade by a team of “awesome scientists,” in Brown’s words, as well as nutritionists and chefs, the all-vegan Impossible aims to reproduce the “sights, sounds, smells, textures and most importantly flavors” of an actual beef burger.

The key element, heme, is a chemical compound that Brown calls a “basic building block of life on earth.” It occurs naturally in animal muscle and legumes, but is synthesized from yeast and substances unknown at Impossible Foods’ Redwood City, Calif., facility.

Heme supposedly generates not only the flavor, but the “bleed” that’s prized by beef lovers. However, the prized ooze barely showed up in the three IBs I tasted.

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The crumbly, thin patty — once I peeled it free from a potato bun, romaine lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, cheese-like substance and sticky “special sauce” they wouldn’t identify — had a slightly gristly texture, meh mouth feel and scarcely more bogus-beef quality than that of common veggie burgers made from grains and legumes.

The best part was what I took to be a dairy-free imitation of American cheese — yeast and nuts, perhaps? — but which turned out to be actual American cheese.
Eh?

“People want [cheese],” a cheerful Chang said, with a shrug as he whipped up a bunch of IBs on the griddle.

Brown summed up his creation, by saying “it’s a waste of time if it’s not delicious.”
It’s a waste then. Hey, maybe another five years and $80 million more will do the trick.

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Photo: Annie Wermiel
http://nypost.com/2016/07/26/this-80-million-veggie-burger-is-not-very-good/