Can the new breed of vegan burgers really be healthy?
A: It’s one of the new breed of vegan burgers, created in a lab to taste (and even bleed) like real beef. But can it possibly be good for you?
FEW things in life are as simple – or as pleasurable to eat – as a burger. That first bite, the rich, meaty and slightly charred flavours, mixed with smooth, salty cheese, the sharpness of onion and the tang of veg and sauce. If this sounds vaguely obsessive, it’s because I’ve not eaten one since going vegetarian four years ago. Do I miss them? Clearly.
Five Guys, Shake Shack, Byron, The Handmade Burger Co – I once enjoyed them all.
My personal go-to was the McDonald’s classic
Double Cheese Burger – it just hit the spot, quite perfectly.
I’ve no regrets about quitting meat. I was put off by stories of horse meat in beef products and organic chicken that was anything but. Then there were reports of the vast quantities of antibiotics used on animals reared by the meat, poultry and fish industries – a major contributor to the global threat of drugresistant bacterial infections.
However, I found bean burgers a bit of a letdown. They promise much but often seem to be either so dry that they suck the moisture from your mouth, or dissolve into a baby-foodlike mush as you eat them.
And don’t even get me started on restaurants that try to pass off a Portobello mushroom sandwiched in a bap as a burger.
Of course, there are meat-substitutes made
from soya, wheat or Quorn, a substance derived from an edible fungus, of which I’ve never been a fan. They are generally flavourless, and more akin to eating Play-Doh or rubber than meat.
There’s also something inherently disappointing about one food pretending to be another. Badly.
But now the alt-meat burger is undergoing something of a reinvention…
THE FAKE MEAT REVOLUTION IS HERE
INCREASINGLY available in high street burger restaurants, and, in the case of the Beyond Meat burger, in supermarkets, there is a new wave of meat-substitute products said to look, smell and taste just like the real thing. They have same texture in the mouth as minced beef, say manufacturers.
Some, if you cook them right, even ‘bleed’ like a real burger. But they are 100 per cent vegan.
The success of these products, initially in trendy burger joints, has snowballed. Now fast-food megachains are getting in on the act.
Last week, Burger King started stocking the vegan Impossible Burger, and Nestle launched their soya and wheat protein Garden Gourmet Incredible Burger.
In addition, the Harvester chain has starting selling the Moving Mountains Burger – the fabled ‘bleeding’ vegan patty.
And they are not just aiming at the 1.6million vegans and vegetarians in Britain today.
Companies are hoping to court the 22million who describe themselves as ‘flexitarian’: part-time non-meat-eaters who opt for veggie meals and products in an attempt to boost their health.
A third of Britons now claim to have ‘meat-free days’, citing ‘health reasons’ and concerns for the environment as the main reasons.
Further down the line, with foodindustry analysts warning that our insatiable desire for evercheaper meat is unsustainable, we could soon all be happily munching on lab-manufactured ‘beef’ burgers that have never even been near a cow.
Perhaps concerned that alt-meat is ever more difficult to distinguish from the real thing, earlier this month the European agriculture committee moved to ban producers of vegetarian food using descriptions usually deployed for meat, suggesting that veggie burgers should be renamed ‘veggie discs’.
So what is actually in these burgers (or discs), and do they really taste like meat?
To find out, we analysed exactly what the manufacturers put in their patties – and spoke to UK food-technology experts about how something so strikingly similar to beef can be made from plants.
With the help of leading dieticians, we examined the nutritional content to find out whether newwave vegan meat substitutes are actually better for us – or even good for us at all.
And, most importantly, we tried them ourselves.
LOOKS, SMELLS AND TASTES LIKE MEAT... BUT IT’S NOT
ANY scepticism I had about the plausibility of turning protein powder and some vegetables into a convincing burger evaporated when I ate a Moving Mountains Burger at our local US-style diner, Dirty Bones.
The patty is made from a blend of soy, wheat and pea protein, mushroom, beetroot juice – for colour – and coconut oil.
My memory of meat may be hazy, but I honestly think I’ve had less beefy-tasting beef burgers. It had the firmness and give, and that soft, yet chewy and slightly fibrous texture that real minced meat has.
Visually, it was equally convincing. The outside was brown and slightly glossy, inside it was a juicy pink and textured, with a few flecks of white – just like a real beef burger cooked medium rare.
At one point I had to check with the waitress that she hadn’t accidentally given me a ‘real’ burger.
For a more rigorous taste test, I ordered the patty on its own.
Naked, it was slightly less convincing. There was a subtle, slightly bitter flavour that beef perhaps doesn’t have. But again, compared to a McDonald’s burger, for instance, it was way meatier.
Moving Mountains is the brainchild of entrepreneur Simeon Van der Molen, who also founded EcoZone, the green cleaning product brand.
Why, I wonder, would someone who doesn’t eat meat want to eat something that looked, smelled and tasted exactly like, for want of a better term, animal flesh?
‘Our product isn’t just aimed at vegans or vegetarians,’ he admits. ‘It’s also for people who want to eat more healthily.
‘If someone is eating five burgers a week, and they’re worried about their cholesterol levels, they can keep eating burgers and get their cholesterol lower by swapping beef for our burger a few times a week.’
The Moving Mountains burger – which is fortified with Vitamin B12, essential for a healthy nervous system and circulation, but found only in meat, offal or fish – contains no synthetic ingredients, he adds. ‘Even the beef flavouring is completely natural.’
THE MAKING OF AN ALT-MEAT BURGER
‘COMPLETELY natural’? It’s an interesting statement, so how true is it?
None of the companies making new-wave vegan beef burgers will reveal their exact manufacturing methods for commercial reasons.
However, using their listed ingredients, and with the help of technical food consultant Lindsay Bagley, we can get an idea.
Like all meat-substitutes, the primary ingredients in these burgers are proteins – derived from soya, peas, wheat and potato, either alone or in combination.
Most vegan products on supermarket shelves use these to make textured vegetable protein, or TVP – a product that was invented in the late 1950s, originally made from soy beans, as a cheap way to ‘bulk’ meat in ready meals.
To create TVP, first you need a protein powder, also known as ‘isolate’ or ‘concentrate’. To obtain this, the original soya bean, pea or other plant must first be crushed and ground to remove the indigestible outer shell, or hull, and then the plant’s natural oils must be removed via a ‘defatting’ process.
The most commonly used method is called hexane extraction.
Simply pressing the vegetable matter doesn’t remove enough oil, so a solvent is added. Benzene and ether can be used, but hexane, which is chemical by-product of crude oil is most commonly used.
The solvent is evaporated away with heat, leaving a solid residue which can then be milled into flours or ‘grits’ that are about 50 per cent protein.
Interestingly, defatted soy flour is also used as a glue in some forms of plywood.
But for it to be used in TVP, it is then washed further in ethanol, acidic waters, and later alkali, to remove carbohydrates and then centrifuged and dried to create a concentrated powder that is about 90 per cent protein.
‘This tastes pretty foul,’ admits Bagley, who advises companies on the manufacture and formulation of foods.
‘Proteins in their naked form have a bitter, astringent flavour that’s not palatable at all.’
Next, the powders are mixed with water, oils, emulsifiers and flavourings to mask the bitter taste. And this paste is then put into a machine known as an extruder.
‘These are a bit like pressure cookers – they use very high-pressure and heat, which gets rid of some of the unpleasant-tasting compounds,’ explains Bagley. ‘What comes out the other end is either a dough or a dry product.
‘You can create just about any shape you like, and a variety of
textures.Itcanbespunintothreads,whichcanthenbecompressedintowhatresembleschickenchunks,orthickerfibrestomimicmeat.Theoptionsareprettyendless.’
The result of the extrusion processisTVP.ButasBagleyexplains:‘Thisisn’tasaleableproduct.It’sanoff-whitecolour,anddoesn’ttastelikemuch,soit’smixedwithotheringredientstoaddfurthermoisture,texture,colour,andflavour.’
MovingMountainsandtheircompetitorshave invested millionsintorefiningthisprocesstocreatea premium, and highly realisticproduct–buttheexactdetailsofhowareacloselyguardedsecret.
The Impossible Foods burger,which is being rolled out by BurgerKing in the US but is not currentlyapproved for sale in the UK orEurope , is even more high-tech , andinvolved genetically engineeringyeast to produce a type of iron normally found only in animal blood .Soon paper , yes , they a remade from plants . But ‘ completelynatural ’ seems to be stretching it a bit .
HOW MUCH MEAT IS IN THE REAL THING?
OFCOURSE,adelicioussliceoforganicgrass-fedbeefisasnaturallynourishingasitgets
Butinanageofspirallingfoodcosts, old-fashioned butcheredmeat–ofthetypenotrearedwithantibiotics,andpreparedbybeingpumpedwithwaterandfooddyes–canbeextravagantlyexpensive.
Burgers are a more affordablefamilymeal.Butjusthowmuchmeat is in the real thing anyway?You can find out with a quickcheckonline.Tesco’sFinestBritishBeef Steak Burgers (£3 for four)are 94 per cent beef, but theirButchersChoiceBurgers(£1.35foreight)containjust63percentbeef.Therest?Onion,peaflour,water,beef fat, salt, dextrose, yeastextract, sugar, pea flakes, onionextract,andblackpepper.
If you start to look at chickenproducts, the picture becomesdismal.Onethingcan’tbedenied:we want burgers. According toanalystsMintel,lastyearBritonsspentanastounding£5billioninburgerrestaurants,up7.5percentin one year alone. Demand hasneverbeengreater.
About 70billion animals arereared for food each year anddemandisprojectedtoincreaseby 70 per cent by 2050, yet theindustryissaidalreadytocause14.5percentoftheworld’sgreenhousegasemissions.
Andthereismountingevidencethatconsumptionofredmeat–andinparticularprocessedredmeat,likeburgers–islinkedtoincreasedriskofheartdisease,obesityandbowelcancer.
Something has to give, so couldfakemeatbetheanswer?
As I said before, I didn’t stopeating meat for any reasonother than the fact that I don’ttrustsupermarkets.
But the reason I put on quite alotofweightinmy20swasbecauseofmyobsessionwithfastfood.
Plant-based or not, burgers stillpack a punch in terms of calories,fat,saltandalltherest.
Fakemeathaswonmeoverinasense.ButIdon’tthinkI’llbegoingbacktomyoldways.
Well, maybe not too often,anyway.