We tried Beyond Burgers for a while. I’d buy the box of 8 frozen patties and pull a couple at a time out to thaw for dinner (they don’t seem to cook up as well from frozen). But they have a weird smell (beets?) and are really oily. Not greasy, oily. Also the thawed patties stick to everything. I usually had to cook them on a copper grill mat if I put them on the grill. And while they were OK taste-wise, it was still obvious that they were fake meat.
My favorite at this point are the Gardein burgers. They smell better, taste better, aren’t as oily, and cook up better from frozen so you don’t have to thaw them out. And they are much closer texture-wise to a real hamburger patty.
Garden burgers are pretty great. The fact that they don’t pretend to be beef makes me like them better, because I’m not thinking about how well they achieve that goal.
Beyond Burgers taste to me a lot like shitty fast food burgers, and I don’t really like shitty fast food burgers. I’ll eat a burger every month or two, and when I do, I want it to be amazing, and worth the damage I’m doing to the environment.
Not Impossible, but in the ballpark: I had a ‘steak’ made from mushrooms. (''eat Meati", frozen, in the crunchy granola aisle of the grocery store.). Weird! It tasted steak-ish, looked steak-ish, but it was obviously not. (“why not steak, if steak shape?” ) It was like something the Enterprise cafeteria might serve on Star Trek.
I’ve tried Impossible Burgers, out of curiousity. When cooked exactly right, and eaten hot, they taste just like any other Burger King burger. But if they’re not cooked exactly right, or you let them get cold, they’re very different.
Personally, I much prefer meat substitutes that don’t try to pretend to be meat. Falafel, for instance, would never be mistaken for meat, but it’s also delicious in its own right. And because you don’t need to process it six ways from Sunday, it’s also a lot cheaper than meat.
) It was like something the Enterprise cafeteria might serve on Star Trek.