While Chang’s version of the burger sports a thin patty, diners can order a thicker version as they order a regular burger: rare, medium rare, etc. “Everyone has their own idea of what a great burger tastes like”, Brown says.
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They said it looks, cooks, smells, sizzles, tastes and even bleeds like ground beef, and they were right.
I was genuinely blown away when I tasted the burger…The Impossible Foods team has discovered how to re-engineer what makes beef taste like beef.
From tomorrow, chef and restaurateur David Chang is bringing an unconventional burger to one of his Momofuku joints. The patty is a blend of water, wheat, potato and other proteins, and one key hidden ingredient: heme. Well+Good got a first taste of Chang’s burger and can say first hand that it truly does taste like just like beef. Though slightly lighter in texture than the burgers you’re used to grilling up on the Fourth of July, it’s salty, chewy and has that nice umami flavor you’re looking for when craving meat.
In 2013 Dutch scientists revealed their US$330,000 (NZ$468,000) lab-grown burger and earlier this year American company Memphis Meats fried the first-ever lab meatball. The Impossible Burger, the buzzed-about burger from Silicon Valley lab Impossible Foods-which Bill Gates invested in and Google already tried (and failed) to buy for $300 million-is indistinguishable from ground beef. He estimates that it cost around $80 million.
“Billions of people love to eat meat and the demand for it has sky rocketed”.
“My work as a professor at Stanford Medical had absolutely nothing to do with food, but I wanted to choose the most important project I could work on with the biggest possible impact on the world”, Brown said.
Momofuku’s first restaurant on the West side of Manhattan, Momofuku Nishi, will serve a limited number of Impossible Burgers during lunch, brunch and dinner service starting Wednesday.
At Tuesday’s press event, Chang told Mashable that Impossible Foods’ eye towards the future of plant-based meat and dairy products enticed him to work with the company. It will be topped with romaine, beefsteak tomato, pickles and special sauce that tastes like mayo and ketchup with something extra, which Chang says is fermented and plant-based though he can’t reveal what it is, all atop a Martin’s potato roll.
Not even joking, though, a bleeding veggie burger might be exactly what New South Wales venues need, seeing as the state’s food authority wants to crack down on any patties that aren’t overcooked.
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“The greenhouse gas footprint is one-eighth of the same burger from a cow, the water footprint is a quarter, and the land footprint is less than one-twentieth of the land footprint of the same burger”, said Brown.
