A good hamburger, on the other hand, relies almost entirely on the flavor of the beef.
There's an informal rule in cooking about how the simpler a dish is, the better your ingredients and technique have to be, because there's nothing to hide behind.
"Patty melt" style burgers are generally less reliant on meat quality as long as you can get a good, crunchy, umami seat on the thin mean patty or patties.
I suspect the thicker higher end style burgers would be more reliant on the quality of the beef.
However, for economic reasons, they are probably the necessary target of impossible meat until they reach a scale large enough to compete with cheap beef.
In-N-Out meat is pretty good; it's just super thin. McDonald's is not good, but believe me, if McDonald's had a good burger patty, and if they wanted to freeze it, it wouldn't be any worse for it.
On the other side of things, In-N-Out doesn't freeze their fries, and they're much worse than the frozen fries from places like McDonald's or Shake Shack's crinkle-cut fries, and it's specifically because they don't do the fry-freeze-refry process critically important for great fries.
from http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/05/the-burger-lab-h...
I do, because I'm not a restaurant, and I don't buy enough meat for one or two servings of hamburger. If a restaurant's been around long enough and has enough turn over, they won't have my problem, but a place could want to freeze for time reasons, or to help with getting a gnarly crust by cooking it from frozen, etc. If you're freezing with the kind of thing the NYC sushi guys use (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/nyregion/sushi-fresh-from-...), and defrosting properly, a truly great hamburger could easily be made from a frozen patty.
I've never heard of a good prefrozen hamburger patty unless you're getting something from Snake River Farms or something along those lines (they ship frozen meat). I freeze my own.
Same goes for fresh bread. Maybe they want to serve pastrami sandwiches in Manhattan, but the best rye bread they can find is in Detroit, and so they have their baker freeze the bread and ship it over. It's not that the bread is better because it was frozen, but they're able to get better bread because they could freeze it.
https://www.dti.dk/_/media/66980_Effect%20of%20packaging,%20... (PDF!)
Freezing food has a stigma that it doesn't deserve if the freezing and thawing is done with care. As I mentioned before, the best sushi restaurants in Manhattan all freeze their fish and store it in extremely cold freezers, and there's no significant detriment to quality. If Shake Shack wanted to do so, they could freeze their patties, and they'd still have one of the best restaurant burgers out there. They certainly would not be freezing their meat in the way that was done in that burger paper, nor would they be using meat of that quality.
Long story short: freezing brisket, not a great plan.
1. It's unlikely that Impossible Foods will ever match the quality of a grass-fed, grain-finished 80/20 chuck + short rib blend from a purveyor like Pat LaFrieda.
2. The dish is heavily spiced and the Impossible Foods product is playing the role of the bolognese. It can hide under the seasoning and spices.
3. I still think the product is valuable. The vast majority of meat product Americans consume meets a much lower bar. I think Impossible Foods already makes a product that's better than the ground meat that goes into a lot of fast food chains. If you didn't tell people, I suspect they'd prefer a Taco Bell or White Castle product made with Impossible Foods instead of the "mix" that they currently use.
That said glutamate is a neurotransmitter, so yeah you probably shouldn't inject large quantities or anything.
Is MSG safe to eat?
FDA considers the addition of MSG to foods to be “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS).
https://www.fda.gov/food/ingredientspackaginglabeling/foodad...
I buy shakers of it, it can be delicious in some meals.
I believe some MSG is still made with this and causes migraines and other heart issues, it's mostly phased out though, and can cause mixed reactions as the type of MSG isn't labelled, let alone MSG.
Until you can provide a shred of evidence for that I will assume you're just adding a layer of legitimate-sounding abstraction to the same superstition. Toxic precursors =/= toxic end products. This is chemistry, not alchemy.
I cooked vegan at home for a long time (I'm not actually an ethical vegan, I just like vegan food). Konbu dashi will give you similar glutamate profiles, but tomatoes, fermented products like shoyu and miso, etc are simple ways to boost the umami as well. Usually the biggest trick in good vegan food is to understand how to balance all of the flavours. Meat based cooking has so many savoury flavours, and if you simply cut out the meat, you end up with overly sweet/sour dishes. They lack depth. If you're designing a dish and you are waiting until the end to figure out how to get the umami in (for example, by adding MSG), then you're really not going to succeed most of the time IMHO. If I want a savoury dish, umami is where I start.
Having said that, I've never made a vegan burger style dish that I've thought was particularly good. I've had some excellent vegan dishes like that at restaurants and I've always wondered how they did it. Since MSG triggers migraines in me, I'm pretty sure it wasn't MSG :-)
[0]http://www.fda.gov/food/ingredientspackaginglabeling/foodadd...
http://science.jrank.org/pages/4433/Monosodium-Glutamate-MSG...
Producing a URL with the word "science" in it ending in .org is not sufficient evidence. Find a single empirical datapoint or published study, otherwise stop spreading fearmongering speculation. Do you concern yourself with which table salt to buy because it may be "bad NaCl"?
I quickly realised that what I like most about sausages isn't really the animal fat / flesh, it's the wheat, barley and or other spices + salt fried in oil that I enjoy. I should also add the texture which was easily reproduced with Seitan.
Also I found Seitan cheese burgers to be really, really good.
I'm a little more skeptical of "pork" substitutes simply because lard makes everything taste better. Split pea soup vs split pea soup with coppa. Regular pie crust vs lard crust. Plain pizza vs with prosciutto. Risotto vs risotto w pork fat (or goose fat). For all of these there's no contest (for me).
They do they same pork version at both lunch and dinner now. I'll ask why they switched next time I stop by.
Aside: I too live very close to Ssam Bar and would be happy to get a coffee in the neighborhood. If you're interested, contact info is in my profile.
Unless they are running a completely solar operation and managing their farms using a system of rotational grazing that sequesters CO2, they most certainly are emitting it.
I see this as only mildly better than CAFOs. Employing holistic management techniques is still the best, and unfortunately, under appreciated way to produce meat in an ethical, sustainable way that also generates new fertile soil and sequesters carbon/methane as a side effect.
Meat is expensive in energy and water because it takes huge amounts of vegetable matter and water for a period of _years_ to get to a point where it's consumable; by contrast, said vegetable matter can be produced in typically less than one year.
How will said vegetable matter get it's nutrients year after year as the soil it's growing on gets eroded? Wouldn't external fertilizer, pesticides, etc need to be brought in? Doesn't creating that expend huge amounts of energy on it's own?
Sure, you have to worry about soil erosion, but by the same token you have to consider the fact that a single cow has a large grazing area. Fertilizers, pesticides etc. are optional but not strictly required, and again don't really change the bottom line.
Sure cows need grazing land, but they don't require all the external inputs an industrial soybean farm, for instance, needs. All they require is land, sunlight, electric fences, and some water if rainfall is inadequate or the soil is in bad shape due to prior mismanagement or desertification.
You just keep their shit, let it decay, microorganisms flourish, and then spread it over the fields. Also switching plants regularily helps keeping decent amount of nitrogen in the soil.
>Sure cows need grazing land, but they don't require all the external inputs an industrial soybean farm, for instance, needs
This only works for extensive breeding, which is no more than 20% in the usa [1]. Sure, these eat hay in the winter, but thats not sufficient to keep animals fat enough. Inside their diet basically is the same as others, which is 50kg of corn silage, and some 2-5 kg of dehydrated soy protein. Per day. Good luck producing as much waste as a cow during her life time.
nb : I live and studied veterinary medicine in Europe, where we don't grow soy and import it from south america mostly (USA grows a lot already, idk if its autosufficient though). So yeah, deforestation exists so we can eat beef :)
1 - http://www.beefusa.org/beefindustrystatistics.aspx " feedlots with greater than 1,000 head capacity account for 81% of all cattle on feed". These mega farms don't do extensive breeding.
A soy bean farm is a bad idea, firstly. To maintain balance, you wouldn't just want to farm soy beans.
Next, grass doesn't just magically appear. It too needs nutrients.
Cow manure is one way to improve soil nutrients, but Permaculture shows us many more ways to keep the cycle flowing.
In the end, the best picture is actually that the cows grazing and the soy beans exist together in a larger system of many other products that work together in providing nutrients that the others need.
Cows, though, are ultimately unnecessary for a Permaculture style system, and we can grow food without them. Then they can just be there as our friends and participate in our agricultural systems as fertilizers, if circumstances happen that way.
Animals, domestic or wild are a critical component of any wild or designed sustainable ecosystem. Research indicates that without the animal’s participation and contribution, ecological integrity is diminished or impossible. Some of the activities that contribute to the system include: foraging to cycle nutrients, clear fallen fruit, weed maintenance, spreading seeds, and pest maintenance. The nutrients are cycled by animals, transformed from their less digestible form (such as grass or twigs) into more nutrient-dense manure.
Fertilizer requires manure. Without manure you need synthetic fertilizer, which breaks the natural feedback loop and no longer good Permaculture practice.
Sure grass doesn't magically appear on it's own, but it can when you rotate some ruminants around from paddock to paddock. I have a friend who has a business doing this. She drives around a truck full of sheep and revitalizes land that has been turned to desert due to overgrazing or mismanagement [2].
1. It won't be eroded if you practice good farming, e.g. Permaculture 2. The meat industry is horrendously worse at regeneration of land than the worst farm practices 3. How else do you expect nutrients arrive in soil? It's a process that happens naturally very easily and just needs to be managed
That said, eliminating cows I still don't think will help the environment. That freed up land will be bought and used for some other purpose. It's natural capitalism. If you want to fix the environment, you need heavy penalities / taxes for nonsustainable resource usage. That's the only way.
Huge fan of a carbon tax.
How did the North American plains support millions of bison just on grass at one point?
A better idea would be less regular manure and more humanure.
And it will often take up land that is more fertile, and as such has a higher biodiversity cost, than what is needed for grazing animals (which can be done on land more barren or harder to farm).
It is often forgotten that you can herd animals in ways that coexist with the rest of the ecosystem, while farming plant based food (especially products like grains or soy) requires you to raze all existing life in the area you wish to use for farmland reducing it to a monoculture with no room for diversity.
(But it should be made clear that this only counts for grazing animals. Industrial meat production where you feed the animals grains gives you the worst of both worlds).
Please explain this in more detail.
>and sequesters carbon/methane as a side effect
I have not heard of a farming practice that sequesters methane released from ruminants. Can you provide more information?
>Please explain this in more detail.
Sure! Plants are much less nutrient dense that animals. So for them to create fake meat that's equally nutrient dense as real meat, their farms have to be adequately large. You need a ton of plants to achieve the density of meat. Animals on land however are already nutrient dense. The only physical space they need is enough room to graze.
>>and sequesters carbon/methane as a side effect
>I have not heard of a farming practice that sequesters methane released from ruminants. Can you provide more information?
Scientists and farmers in this area can do a much better job explaining it than I [1], [2], [3].
[1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...
The animal's only energy source is plants. Some portion of that energy goes into producing muscle and organ tissue. Some of it is converted to heat. The rest is used for respiration, digestion, thinking, walking around, dreaming, and all the other ongoing processes of life. Animals don't undergo photosynthesis, nor do they spontaneously generate energy.
Unless there's something else you're getting at here. Energy loss and trophic levels is a pretty well-understood idea.
http://kids.britannica.com/students/assembly/view/90132
Admittedly, there is a bit more nuance to the issue; for example, a cow can produce milk and meat from grass, which, for humans, creates available nutrients where there were none before. However, we could also plant that field of grass with corn or potatoes and get many more calories for the same amount of water and sunlight.
I promise you it is not.
At Momofuku's Ssam Bar in the East Village of NYC, you can order an off menu item called Spicy Pork Sausage and Rice Cakes. It's not really off the menu - the item has simply been around so long and is so well known to regulars that they left it off to make room for new dishes.
I've had it more times than I count.
At lunch time however, they serve Spicy "Impossible Sausage" and Rice Cakes. The first time I ordered it, I was ready to complain about one of my favorite things ruined by a hyped product.
But then I took my first bite, and it somehow tasted better than the pork sausage version. I've been back many times since and the Impossible Foods version of the dish is often tastier than the pork version.
Let that sink in for a moment. Impossible Foods was able to replace high quality pork sausage served in a beloved dish at one of New York's buzziest restaurants and make the dish better.
The vast majority of ground meat in the American food chain is of lower quality. If Impossible Foods can replace that ground meat at scale, the ramifications are enormous. They will reduce by a huge margin the number of animal lives and quantity of CO2 necessary to feed us.