I've eaten many veggie burgers previously, whether they be bean, soy, or mushroom based, and always after eating one I felt like it tasted OK, but I was left wanting a steak even more.
For reasons I don’t understand, some of the most satisfying unintentionally vegetarian food I’ve eaten has been in the agriculture regions of the US, like the Palouse, where legumes are ubiquitous local crops. Popular vegetarian cooking has never picked up those recipes, which are much better to my taste than what passes as a lot of vegetarian fare. I’ll go for months as a vegetarian but I cook my own food, leaning heavily on the cuisine of regions that aren’t vegetarian per se but nonetheless produce surprisingly satisfying vegetarian dishes based on legumes. I’ve convinced far more meat eaters with these dishes than with fake meat.
It’s a marketing gap. A lot of vegetarian cooking is biased towards a sweet/sour/starchy flavor profile; people that don’t like those flavors in their food generally are on their own, the alternatives are not well represented.
It’s impossible not to ask. Could you share any recipes or dish preparation tips?
The thing to understand about legumes is that some of them, with appropriate preparation, can constructively absorb prodigious quantities of salt and fat. For example, you can fry lentils, which are delicious on their own (I think these are eaten in the Middle East), but that can be a prep step for further processing. Many people make cakes or patties, often pan frying them. Addictive as hell and salty, and you can’t eat a lot of it, but it tastes amazing and various forms are sometimes used as a meat alternative e.g. with eggs for breakfast.
The caveat, which I’ve learned the hard way, is that there is quite a bit of non-obvious knowledge on how to process the legumes for these dishes, and it has multiple stages. Texture and consistency control, as well as the interplay of oil and water, is not trivial. Lentils are the most complicated but also the most interesting, but the multiple processing steps are more work than is convenient. I left when I was a kid, so I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure it out by trial and error. When I travel back there, local restaurants still serve these kinds of things. I could basically eat this stuff every day and never miss meat. They also make some interesting sauce/gravy type preparations from legumes, which are similar to things I’ve had in Germany (probably adapted, the population there is ethnically German).
They have variants of all these things based on lentils, chickpeas, and dry (split) peas, which are pretty different in practice.
I’ve also done a fair amount of work adapting classic Indian vegetarian food concepts to completely different European food contexts and use cases. These creations have been immensely popular; my prodigiously carnivorous friends request them.
Ironically, I think it would be far more appealing if they didn’t try to make it simulated meat and leaned into its strengths. Vegetarian burgers that don’t pretend to be meat taste better. Legumes that are expertly processed as a protein, without trying to be meat, taste better. The Impossible Burger falls into the same category as “fat-free mayo”; trying to maintain the pretense ultimately produces a poor experience.
I am an accidental vegetarian most days but I won’t eat Beyond Beef or Impossible Burger. The products taste unpleasantly synthetic. If I wanted to eat legumes, I can create something far better tasting for much less money. If I want a burger, I’ll eat a burger — marketing aside, the gap is still very wide.