Why Impossible Burgers aren't that good

okay let's check out the selection these are all meat-free products that aim to mimic meat and a lot of them taste pretty good but almost none of them would actually fool you into thinking they're real meat why is meat so hard to imitate this is minute food and we are dedicating a few videos to some of the ways people are trying to make meat just as delicious but more responsible last time we took a spin through the weird world of lab-grown meat now we're going to dig into meat that isn't actually meat at all first are patented nobody's paying us to say this stuff disclaimer as usual none of the companies mentioned in here or any meatless meat companies for that matter are giving us any money to make this video on that note if you want to give us money check out our patreon community anyway animal free proteins are nothing new lots of people in lots of places have been eating them for lots and lots and lots of years some are more similar to meat than others but in General these Foods were invented as vegetarian sources of protein not to mimic meat as closely as possible in fact lots of vegetarians don't want to eat something that's super meat-like but if we want to fix the big problems with eating meat we need to get mainstream meat eaters like me to replace at least some of the meat in our diet with animal-free products and study after study after study has found that in order for that to happen we need products that are super meat-like but that turns out to be remarkably hard because plants are pretty different from animals obviously right but I'm talking on a molecular level take proteins animals muscles are mostly made up of bundles of interlocked fibers those long fibrous proteins are what give me its springy texture but most plant proteins take a very different form they're coiled and folded up into tiny balls these much smaller much less cohesive proteins are why plant-based products like veggie burgers tend to be soft and crumbly rather than springy chewy the fats and plants and animals are also fundamentally different animal fats tend to be saturated as a result they stay solid at higher temperatures than plant fats which are generally unsaturated that may not seem like a big deal but it can mean the difference between a food that melts at room temperature and one that stays intact animals also tend to have more fat than plants and that fat is distributed through animals differently than it's distributed through plants animals also contain all sorts of substances that plants don't or at least not in large concentrations like heme the molecule that makes meat meaty and nucleotides the compounds that make meat over the top umamalicious so considering all these pretty fundamental differences how can you turn this into something that can pass for this wait no for this the first way is to modify basically every aspect of it this is what a lot of the most famous meatless meat companies like Beyond and impossible do using some complicated chemistry they uncoil those knotted up plant proteins stretch them out and Link them together to end up with proteins more like the fibrous ones found in meat they supplement the limited amount of naturally occurring fat with additional plant-based saturated fats in a weird convergence of very different processed foods many of these companies use the flash freezing method pioneered by the ice cream company Dippin Dots to solidify the fat so that it can be distributed in a way that better mimics the fat in meat finally they add plant-based heme and other flavorings to ensure the taste and appearance are right in other words many plant-based meat mimics are super processed foods I'm not gonna go down the processed foods Rabbit Hole in this video we can do that another time but what is relevant here is that while super processed plant-based products are decent at mimicking super processed animal-based products like nuggets sausages and burgers they aren't very good at all at mimicking whole animal products like steak or chicken breasts there are a small number of other less processed Roots out there from this to something like this the stringy texture of Jackfruit for instance can somewhat successfully replicate pulled chicken or pork and I visited a company called finless foods which makes plant-based ahi tuna from a Gore often called winter melon it's diced up dehydrated and stewed with a few other basic ingredients for flavor and color it was really tasty but neither the texture nor the flavor perfectly replicated yellowtail it was more successful in a tuna roll where it was masked by other ingredients than on its own considering the pretty big differences between plants and animals there's another option for creating vegetarian meat mimics skip plants all together and use something more closely related to animals like fungi but we are not talking mushrooms here we're talking about a few species of microscopic filamentous fungi the big benefit is that these fungi are inherently fibrous so they don't need all that much processing to turn them into something resembling meat I visited the better meat company which produces this stuff called mycoprotein and I tasted it unadulterated and while the texture is pretty good on its own it doesn't taste much like meat it does have some good Umami going on again since fungi are relatively closely related to animals they produce some of the same umami-rich compounds but in order to make micro protein taste more like meat manufacturers have to add some other flavoring ingredients the results which you can buy under a bunch of different brand names is I don't know kind of successful at mimicking meat but there were a few dishes I tasted at better meat company that blew me away these were ones where my mycoprotein was combined with actual animal proteins like with real crab in this crab cake and real tuna in the sushi and I know putting real meat in there makes it a definitely not animal-free product which might seem like it defeats the whole point but remember I'm coming at all this from the perspective of reducing our overall meat consumption and let's be honest the meat mimics we have right now aren't perfect or even close to perfect and research shows that the fact that their taste and texture aren't quite there does keep people from buying and eating these products using a combination of vegetarian and animal protein might get close enough to The Taste and texture of actual meat to convert meat eaters that aren't willing to switch over to the fully vegetarian products that are currently available so far these kinds of Blended products have only had limited success I couldn't find any in my local store but there are a lot of companies exploring the idea the bottom line is there's no single path to making meat out of well not meat the good news is that every single path I mentioned is way less crappy for animals and for the environment than most commercially available meat and while none of these products are perfect meat mimics they're constantly getting better impossible Burgers have already been through multiple reformulations since their launch in 2016. so don't be chicken try some of the options and see what you think [Music] but hang on I want to take you to another even more overwhelming section of the grocery store the wine aisle honestly I usually end up choosing based on the labels which it turns out is not the best way to pick wine bright Cellars offers a totally different way answer seven ridiculously simple questions get wine suggestions from all around the world and a few days later a box of personally curated wine shows up on your doorstep if you don't like a bottle they'll replace it and one bonus I really love is these gorgeous cards with notes about each wine including food pairing ideas yeah this is an ad but I honestly do think that bright sellers is remarkably good at making wine a fun approachable experience rather than a stressful cross your fingers one and it's remarkably affordable too as a minute food fan you can get your first six bottle subscription box for just 60 bucks plus your purchase will support us click the link on screen and in the description to give bright sellers a try [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: MinuteFood

Views: 232,490

Keywords: vegetarian, impossible, beyond, meat, meatless, alternative, substitute, grocery, shopping, biology, processing, processed, best

Id: _ibkfRyFCxA

Length: 8min 30sec (510 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2023