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San
Francisco-based startup Impossible Foods might have just achieved the
impossible – making plants tastes like meat. Their Impossible Burger is
made entirely of plants, but sizzles on the grill, oozes fat and
reportedly tastes like a delicious cooked beef patty.
Red meat consumption around the world is at an all time high, but
producing high quantities of meat to satisfy demand is not sustainable
and it’s already taking a heavy toll on the environment. In recent
years, experts have been busy coming up with alternatives to animal
meat, like switching to a protein-rich insect-based diet, growing meat
in the lab and even artificial meat made from sewage mud. But one
San-Francisco company may have discovered a much more viable solution –
a mashup of plant-based ingredients that tastes just like real meat.
Impossible Foods has been working on an alternative to meat for the last
five years, and its soon-to-be-launched Impossible Burger is already
receiving high praise for its likeness to beef patties in taste, texture
and appearance.
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When former Stanford biochemist Patrick Brown founded Impossible Foods,
he set his goal on creating a product that would change the world, and
the Impossible Burger might do just that. He and his research team have
spent years analyzing meat molecules to find out what makes a burger
taste, smell and cook the way it does, in the belief that everything
animal can be replicated using plant-based compounds. And judging by the
testimonies of the few people who have actually sampled this
revolutionary burger, Brown was right.
Even before starting his company, Patrick Brown suspected that there was
a certain ingredient in meat that made it taste differently than other
foods – heme. “I had a very strong suspicion early on that heme would be
the magic ingredient for flavor,” he told NPR. This iron-containing
molecule is what makes our blood red and gives meat its pink hue and
slightly-metallic taste. While heme is highly concentrated in red meat,
it can also be found in plants, and that gave him hope that making a
plant burger look and taste like one made from beef was not such a crazy
idea.
But extracting heme from legumes like soybeans, which contain
leghemoglobin in nodules on their roots, would have been both expensive
and time-consuming, not to mention that unearthing the plants would
release carbon in the atmosphere. Instead, he and his team found a way
to transfer the soybean gene that encodes the heme protein to yeast,
which allows Impossible Foods to produce vast quantities of the
blood-like substance.
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Each vat of frothy red liquid in the company laboratory contains enough
heme to produce over 20,000 quarter-pound Impossible Burgers. “We have
to be able to produce this on a gigantic scale,” Brown said.
“Ultimately, we want it to be practical to produce enough of our product
to match what’s currently consumed in the U.S. or the world. Well,
that’s a lot of heme.” That’s because the Impossible Burger isn’t
targeting vegetarians, but billions of meat lovers around the world.
But nailing the taste of meat in a veggie burger is just one of the
things Impossible Foods had to achieve to guarantee the success of their
innovative product. To replicate animal fat, they decided to mix flecks
of coconut oil into the blend of textured wheat protein and potato
protein making up the “plant meat” of the burger. The oil remains solid
until the burger patty is placed in a hot frying pan, at which point it
starts to ooze and sizzle just like animal fat.
The meat-like smell of the Impossible Burger was also engineered by a
team of researchers. They put cooked meat in a gas chromatography mass
spectrometry machine, which separates thousands of compounds, and
smelled it through a tube, which allowed them to identify the specific
individual components of the scent. They identified butter, maple syrup,
a diaper pail, smoke, grass and even a raspberry bug. “The smell of meat
is the simultaneous exposure to these hundreds of different smells, and
the smell of meat happens up here,” Brown said, while pointing to his
head.
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NPR’s Lindsay Hoshaw had a chance to feast on an Impossible Burger, and
described the taste as “unreal”. “The flavor was slightly less potent
than meat, but if I didn’t already know this burger was made from
plants, I wouldn’t have guessed it. The texture as I chewed was just
like ground beef,” she wrote.
Sustainability and realistic taste are just two of the several
advantages the Impossible Burger has over a beef one. It also contains
more protein, less fat and fewer calories than a meat burger and because
there’s no actual meat in it, there’s no cholesterol either.
At the moment, an Impossible Burger is more expensive than one made with
real meat, but Impossible Foods CEO Patrick Brown says that is going to
change once production increases. His company is already leasing a
66,913-square-foot manufacturing facility in Oakland to ramp up
production of their meatless meat.
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