My problem as well. All the impossible burger or beyond meat stuff appears worse for you (nutritionally) than a real burger. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't that.
I had the same experience. I have tried both the impossible and beyond meat burgers and ended up not being able to finish them as I really didn't like the taste.
I had high hopes because I had watched these TV segments where they were eating them and saying how it tastes like a burger. But not for me.
Weird. I think the impossible burgers are ok but bland, but love Beyond meat.
I never bought any "veggie burger" products for at home, but would occasionally order one in a restaurant when it was the best option and thought they were always just sort of tolerable.
Beyond meat has been such a game-changer for me. I probably eat about 3-5 servings of a Beyond meat product per week now. Anecdotally, the only people I've seen who had a strongly negative reaction seemed to be overcooking them significantly.
I have never tried Beyond Meat and maybe I should give it a try but I am hesitant because of my experience with Impossible burgers. Obviously they must taste similar to meat and be tasty to the majority of people, but to me they taste nothing like meat and are quite disgusting. I know a few others that have the same reaction while most people at worse seem to think they taste like a low quality burger. I wonder what is in them that causes some like myself to have such a negative reaction to them and how large that percentage of people is.
I didn't care for the first iteration of the Impossible burger either. I thought it tasted just like a Morning Star Farms Grillers Prime, making it nothing special in veggie-burger land.
However, it seems to have improved significantly, to the point that twice now I've thought they accidentally gave me real beef, had a meet-eating friend confirm, and after talking to the waiter and cook and taking a much closer look decided I was wrong.
I love Beyond burgers too, but they are more distinct from real beef as far as my >10yr vegetarian tongue can tell.
I think that Beyond is feeling the pinch more, because it just tastes terrible. Impossible isn't as good as a real burger, but it's significantly better than Beyond, and Impossible is fine (discounting the cost) for filling out a spaghetti sauce or something where you can't taste the meat that well. So I think it's consumer preferences at work here
I was also underwhelmed by the Impossible Foods burger, which was a better imitation of meat than other patties, but not necessarily tastier.
The bigger surprise to me was that Impossible Foods does not apparently control how restaurants prepare their burgers—in fact, the restaurant where I ate it even had an Impossible Foods chili. I would have expected IF to put pretty close restrictions around how you cook and present their foods, to make sure that people don't have a bad experience and assume it's the fault of the "meat".
I've had both the Beyond Burger (at Veggie Grill, a vegetarian restaurant) and the Impossible Burger (at an actual burger restaurant).
I was extremely disappointed with the Beyond Burger-- it had a weird taste and I personally did not think it tasted anywhere remotely near real meat. It was oversalted, but I've heard some other people complain it's because the patty is already very salty and restaurants add more salt. It also might be a function of the fact that this was a vegetarian place and I don't think they're used to cooking burgers.
The Impossible Burger I was much more impressed with-- it still wouldn't fool me at all and I wouldn't quite replace beef with it yet, but I'm looking forward to seeing if they can improve it just slightly. For me, it doesn't have to taste exactly like beef before I would eat it over traditional burgers, it just needs to be a little closer. I would also like to try it somewhere that doesn't put as many fixings on it to taste the patty in a more pure form, since my burger was some miso-seaweed thing with strong flavors that could have been masking the patty (perhaps intentionally).
I've had a beyond meat burger, I'm curious to hear the opinion of others that have had one too because I thought it tasted terrible. The texture was nothing like real ground beef and neither was the flavour. It wasn't good different either - I'd much rather have a regular bean burger.
I feel like it's all marketing and they're just riding the hype wave caused by other better products or peoples desire for one. (I assume the Impossible Burger is better - they seem to have gone into more effort to replicate beef, but I haven't tried one)
While I'm also excited about fake meat, the impossible burger isn't close.
Impossible tastes as if you took low quality meat, pureed it, took all the fat out, made it into a patty, and then froze it. Sure, you could trick me into thinking its real meat, but not high quality meat.
And of course, this is completely different than creating a steak or something.
i tried (ed: strike impossible) beyond burgers recently. they were... ok. but i did notice that i felt extremely sluggish after eating them. (like having to lay down)
the thickness of the oil exuded onto the griddle and the difficulty i had cleaning it off was a bit frightening as well... but i don't prepare meat so maybe the real deal is worse?
I bought a couple of Beyond Meat burgers at the supermarket recently and tried them. Big mistake. The texture was nothing like a real burger and they left an unpleasant pea protein aftertaste in my mouth for ages afterwards.
Beyond Meat/Impossible Burger were disgusting to me (compared to regular beef), and they were dyed bright red and stayed bright red when they were cooked which is weird and not like meat.
Where did you have this burger? My experience with Impossible Burgers (at The Counter) is not at all like this. They were a pretty good facsimile of meat. I’d go so far as to say they changed my opinion on meat substitutes.
Previously, I was in the same camp as all those here saying they prefer delicious food that doesn’t pretend to be meat - but I think I’d choose an Impossible Burger over that now if I was in the mood for a burger.
As a counter-counter-point, I recently tried the Impossible burger, and while it's amazing, it's not remotely close to real meat. And that's in ground-beef-covered-with-cheese-and-sauce-and-toppings form. Impossible vs a great steak or some grilled salmon? No way.
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