There’s a new, meat-free challenger to the city’s burger hierarchy — but from Minetta Tavern’s luscious Black Label number to ubiquitous Big Macs, the reigning favorites can relax.
The Impossible Burger — a hotly awaited, laboratory-created, all-plant product meant to look, taste and smell like beef and even ooze “blood” — was unveiled Tuesday by its biochemist creator Patrick O. Brown and superchef David Chang.
It’s taken Brown’s Impossible Foods lab five years and $80 million — $80 million — to turn out a burger I wouldn’t pay 80 cents for. And I definitely wouldn’t pay $12 for it, which is how much it will go for at Momofuku Nishi, Chang’s Chelsea restaurant that will start serving the burger on Wednesday.
The Impossible Burger promises to wean a nation of carnivores off ground beef for the pleasures of wheat, potato protein, coconut oil, ever popular xanthan gum and a mysterious substance called heme.
The end result of a five-year, Manhattan Project-like crusade by a team of “awesome scientists,” in Brown’s words, as well as nutritionists and chefs, the all-vegan Impossible aims to reproduce the “sights, sounds, smells, textures and most importantly flavors” of an actual beef burger.
The key element, heme, is a chemical compound that Brown calls a “basic building block of life on earth.” It occurs naturally in animal muscle and legumes, but is synthesized from yeast and substances unknown at Impossible Foods’ Redwood City, Calif., facility.
Heme supposedly generates not only the flavor, but the “bleed” that’s prized by beef lovers. However, the prized ooze barely showed up in the three IBs I tasted.
The crumbly, thin patty — once I peeled it free from a potato bun, romaine lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, cheese-like substance and sticky “special sauce” they wouldn’t identify — had a slightly gristly texture, meh mouth feel and scarcely more bogus-beef quality than that of common veggie burgers made from grains and legumes.
The best part was what I took to be a dairy-free imitation of American cheese — yeast and nuts, perhaps? — but which turned out to be actual American cheese.
Eh? What’s that doing with a product that’s supposed to be made entirely from plants?
“People want [cheese],” a cheerful Chang said, with a shrug after he’d finished whipping up a bunch of IBs on the griddle.
Brown summed up his creation, by saying “it’s a waste of time if it’s not delicious.”
It’s a waste then. Hey, maybe another five years and $80 million more will do the trick.
