An Impossible Review

I cooked with Impossible “ground beef” for the first time tonight. I had previously eaten two impossible burgers at restaurants (although one was from Burger King so I’m not sure if that one counts).

I made Fettuccine Bolognese and here’s what the process was like for anyone who’s curious:

When the “meat” was raw it looked and felt 95%+ like real ground beef. When I looked carefully I could tell that something was slightly different but the differences were extremely subtle. I was also surprised at how much it smelled like raw ground beef.

The cooking process was so similar to ground beef that I actually forgot that I was cooking fake meat a couple of times in the few short minutes it took to sauté it. From breaking it up to browning to searing, the Impossible burger behaved almost exactly like ground beef. The changes in color and texture as well as the changes in pliability and elasticity were incredibly beef-like.

When I tasted the “beef” before adding the rest of the sauce, it tasted very much like ground beef except for the fact that I could taste the coconut oil, which is one of its main ingredients. Basically it tasted like ground beef that had been sautéed in coconut oil. The texture on the other hand was spot on.

Once I had incorporated the “beef” into the final sauce it was almost entirely indistinguishable from real meat. I’m convinced that if I had fed it to a dozen unsuspecting people, they would not think anything was amiss or have any reason to question the meat’s authenticity.

I’m really impressed by what Impossible has done with this product.

Trader Joe’s Soy Chorizo was the first product that I viewed as a viable meat substitute in my diet. Nuggs plant-based “chicken” nuggets were the second (although I liked Nuggs v1.6 slightly better than the current Nuggs v2.0). Impossible is now the third entry on that list.

I’ll experiment with burgers and other uses for ground beef soon but if Impossible performs in those other applications anywhere near as well as it did in the Bolognese then I suspect it will become a regular part of my diet.