SAN MATEO, Calif. — Even before opening my restaurant, Wursthall, here a couple years ago, I knew that taking vegan and vegetarian options seriously — with both traditionally vegan foods and modern meat alternatives — would be a central element of its success.
Though sausages form the backbone of the menu, my team and I believed that people who don’t eat meat should be able to dine in mixed company without feeling that they were second-class citizens, or that their meal consisted of a series of side dishes, as they so often do at restaurants.
For me, a food-science writer who is a chef on the side, this meant testing, and lots of it.
Until recently, the faux-meat options — plant-based alternatives designed to replicate the flavor, texture and appearance of meat — have been abysmal. All that changed when two companies, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, introduced a new generation of vegan meat substitutes developed with tens of millions of dollars of funding and years of scientific research.
[Read the results of our taste test of plant-based meats.]
Both companies claim that their products behave just like beef — with meaty flavor, juiciness and bloody red color — and unlike other products, which come preformed as patties or meatballs, can be deployed in all kinds of recipes that call for ground beef. Some supermarkets even stock them in the meat department.
The reality, though, is that their ability to mimic meat depends on exactly how you cook them.
Over the past two-and-a-half years, my team has worked with thousands of pounds of the new products (which, for the sake of convenience, I’ll refer to as vegan meat), developing dozens of dishes that have sold remarkably well. Our Impossible-based sandwiches sell at about half the rate of traditional burgers (our most popular sandwich), and better than our average sausage. And it’s not just vegans ordering them.
Even before that, I started my own experimentation with burgers, by far the most common way vegan meat is served.
My first instinct was to use my favorite burger-making technique: smashing. By pressing balls of ground beef with a stiff spatula onto a hot steel griddle, letting them sizzle for a minute or so, then scraping them up with a razor-fitted wallpaper remover, you maximize meaty flavor through intense Maillard browning, the series of chemical reactions that give seared meats their characteristic brown color and complex flavor.
The vegan meat started off promising, sizzling and sputtering just like beef. The patties even looked great as I scraped them off the griddle. (Both the Beyond and Impossible products tend to brown a bit faster than beef.)
Eating them told a different story. There was no juiciness to speak of, and it seemed that, rather than making the patties taste meatier, the intense browning drove off moisture and flavor.
The problem lies partly in the difference between beef fat and vegetable fats.
Much of the flavor and rich texture in beef comes from fat and fat-soluble organic compounds. Beef fat starts to soften as it warms past room temperature, but doesn’t fully liquefy until it’s past 140 degrees (what would be considered medium-well for a steak), and that rendering process takes time. As a result, when you cook a beef burger, some of the fat melts out, helping the patty sizzle. But some of it merely softens and stays incorporated in the patty, keeping it juicy and flavorful even when cooked to medium (as long as it’s served immediately).
[Learn more about the science behind plant-based meats.]
Coconut oil, the primary fat used in vegan meat, liquefies much faster and at a lower temperature, around 75 degrees for virgin oil and 105 degrees for hydrogenated oil. It runs out of thinner patties, leaving them dry and unpleasantly vegetal-tasting.
Impossible and Beyond burgers really shine when they are formed into thicker patties that trap liquefied fat, are cooked no more than medium-rare and are paired with robustly flavored toppings.
Most fast-food restaurants cook their burgers thin and well done. But some have figured out that vegan patties benefit from toppings and cooking methods that add strong flavors. White Castle swaps out its standard steamed beef patty for a grilled vegan patty, and American cheese for smoked Cheddar. Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s offer a vegan cheeseburger with barbecue sauce and onion rings.
(At Wursthall, we serve no vegan burgers at the moment. Later this year, we plan to offer Impossible Burgers griddled thick and served with caramelized onion and pickled chiles.)
But as good as a burger can be, a more forgiving way to serve vegan meat is in heavily seasoned dishes, like meatballs or meatloaf, especially if they include a starchy binder to help retain some of the fat and juices even when cooked well done.
Think meatballs bound with bread crumbs and seasoned Italian-American style with plenty of garlic and Parmesan in a bright marinara sauce, or Swedish meatballs with warm spices and a rich mushroom gravy. I’ve made a variation of hambagu (a popular Japanese dish similar to Salisbury or Hamburg steak), flavored with soy sauce and porcini powder, that I’ve enjoyed more than the beef or pork original.
It’s no coincidence that the most successful dishes I’ve made with plant-based meat have included ingredients like mushrooms, soy sauce, tomatoes and aged cheeses. All of these ingredients are rich in glutamates, the chemical compounds largely responsible for the mouthwatering savory flavor known as umami. (If you aren’t averse to it, a sprinkle of monosodium glutamate, or MSG, can work wonders with vegan meat.)
One of the more interesting, and expensive, experiments I’ve tried at Wursthall was cooking 15-pound blocks of seasoned Impossible meat on a vertical rotisserie in the style of doner kebab, the Turkish street food popular throughout much of Europe, especially Germany and Scandinavia.
To make it, I heavily spiced the vegan meat with aromatics like garlic, oregano, cumin, sumac and chiles, molded it into the classic inverted cone shape, threaded it onto a vertical rotisserie, then let it rotate slowly in front of a flame. As the outer layers sizzled and crisped, I shaved them off with a knife and served them in sandwiches with sumac-seasoned onions, tomatoes, arugula and a garlicky sauce.
The sandwiches were delicious and, to my genuine surprise, the meat cone browned and held together just like traditional ground beef or lamb — at least for the first 15 minutes or so. Eventually the fat melted out, and the meat started grotesquely sloughing off the cone. Adding a touch of transglutaminase (a common meat binder that chefs refer to as “meat glue”) to the mix helped, but not much.
Why didn’t it work? Typically, those ground meat cones are made like sausages: Seasoned ground meat is mixed and kneaded until raw proteins begin to stretch and entangle with one another on a microscopic level, forming a sticky, cohesive texture that retains fat and moisture, and develops a springy bite when cooked.
The plant proteins in Impossible and Beyond meats, on the other hand, are precooked, which makes it difficult for them to entangle.
The same problem extended to all of our experiments in making vegan sausages and hot dogs, which come out grainier and softer than meat sausages.
The most success we’ve had with sausages has been in adding a binding emulsion of flax seeds and oil to the mix. Beyond Meat offers its own preformed sausages that come close but fall short of mimicking a meat sausage, at least in direct, side-by-side comparisons. Impossible Foods recently introduced a vegan pork alternative that promises to work better for sausages, though I haven’t had more than a cursory opportunity to experiment with it.
All in all, my main conclusion is this: Both Impossible and Beyond meats are at their best when cooked in dishes that start with breaking them up in a frying pan. I’ve made chili, ragù Bolognese, tamale pie and sloppy Joes that many tasters could not distinguish from the ground-beef versions.
In a skillet, Impossible meat browns, renders fat, breaks up under a wooden spoon and cooks just like ground beef. Beyond Meat starts off a bit mushier and pastier, but once it starts cooking, it breaks up and browns just fine.
Vegan meat is excellent in those Chinese recipes that rely on a sparing amount of ground meat to add flavor and texture to primarily plant-based dishes. Sichuan classics like dan dan noodles and mapo tofu, for instance, can be made completely vegan without any noticeable loss of flavor or texture. Even meat-forward dishes like Thai-style phat ka-phrao, in which ground meat is stir-fried with powerfully flavored ingredients like bird’s-eye chiles, basil and fish sauce, are comparable to their meaty counterparts.
I’ve seasoned vegan meat with dried chiles, cinnamon, oregano and cumin to make chorizo and potato tacos that sing with flavor. I’ve even tried it with that seasoning packet that comes in a boxed hard-shell taco kit. No complaints here (at least none that I wouldn’t also have with the same kits using ground beef).
In the end, as with any food, success in cooking vegan meats depends on the recipes and techniques used to prepare them. When made right, they hit those pleasure points — the satisfying chew, the fatty richness, the juicy drips, the red color — that up until now, vegan and vegetarian alternatives have lacked.
Is that good enough?
As a chef who strives to reduce my own meat intake and offer plant-based dishes to as wide an audience as possible, I think modern vegan meat is among the most important technological leaps I’ve seen in my career. And if sales figures are any indication, the incentive to produce ever-better versions shows no sign of flagging.
Recipes: Vegan Turkish Kebabs With Sumac Onions and Garlic-Dill Mayonnaise | Vegan Chili | Vegan Cheeseburgers
