First things first: Dear Beyond Meat people, dear Impossible Foods. If you read this, can we just say ‘please don’t sue us’? We love you! We love you for the noise you’ve been making with your products, making waves for sustainability and veganism, and for creating ways to work against global warming (through minimizing meat consumption).
First Things first: Please don’t sue us?
Obviously, we haven’t been able to crack the code and are sharing your secret recipe. We just tried to get close. Did we make a burger that is an alternative to your products? Not really. Did we try our best to come close? For sure. This is our home made homage to your work, made in a small kitchen instead a highly equipped laboratory. This was just a fun experiment, inspired by your work and that’s really it. You’re the top-10-hit, we’re just a local cover band.
“Heme is the ferruginous molecule responsible for the characteristic metallic taste of meat.”
Okay? Okay. So how did we decide to try recreating the silicon valley hype? Well, first off we tend to be a bit over-ambitious. And secondly, Impossible Food shares their recipe online. Well, kind of: The ingredients are made public and you can get a good idea of how these guys work. And work they did: Especially when it comes to the still rather mysterious main ingredient, heme. A ferruginous molecule responsible for the characteristic, slightly metallic taste of meat. There’s no way we could recreate that — but what we can do is go to the next drugstore and buy ‘herbal blood’, a German old school supplement that’s packed with iron and helps us to recreate a bit of your signature heme-taste.
We needed to keep Things sticky
Now for the mouth feel, Beyond goes for pure pea protein, while Impossible works with texturized soy protein concentrate. The latter sounds especially wild, but if you look at it, it‘s pretty much a staple in vegan households anyway in the form of dried soy patties or dry mince ‚meat‘.
To keep things sticky, we added pea-protein isolate (make sure to buy the neutral one, a vanilla flavored one wouldn‘t really help with the taste of the burger). Add xanthan and carob gum and a dash of seitan fix for consistency. Then beets for the color, coconut oil for the fats and yes, quite a lot of the ladder. These are burgers after all, nobody promised them to be super healthy, so deal with it.
“Get in your lab coat — and with the program.”
Finishing up with seasoning: Nutritional yeast, miso and soy sauce, a bit of onion powder and garlic and we’re good to go. So get in your lab coat and with the program — let’s do it! And if this one isn’t your jam after all, there’s a ton of other burger recipes on our website for you.
Ingredients for 4 Patties
- 75 g neutral coconut oil
- 100 ml beetroot juice
- 40 ml soy sauce
- 100 g granulated soy
- 10 g nutritional yeast
- 50 g seitan fix
- 3 g xanthan
- 2 g carob gum
- 40 ml ‚herbal blood‘
- 2 TL liquid smoke
- 16 g neutral pea protein
- 10 g miso paste
- 6 g garlic powder
- 4 g onion powder
- 4 tbsp sunflower oil
Pro Tips
- Feel free to put our Beyond Possible burgers on the grill, as well. We would advise to use a flattop, though, as they tend to stick to a cooking grate easily.
- The patty batter only gets better over night, as long as you keep it in the fridge. And by the way: They freeze well!
Instructions
- Freeze 30 g of coconut oil for at least two hours.
- Mix beetroot juice, soy sauce and the remaining coconut oil and bring to the boil. Add granulated soy and nutritional yeast, then mix and let soak for 15 minutes.
- Add seitan fix and let cool down.
- Create a thick paste by mixing xanthan, carob gum, herbal blood and liquid smoke. Add paste to the granulated soy, together with pea protein, miso paste, garlic- and onion powder and knead well.
- Grate the frozen coconut oil and fold in the patty mix using a cold wooden spoon. The oil flakes should be evenly distributed in the batter. Keep mixture cool.
- Heat sunflower oil in a pan, case iron would be best. Add salt and pepper as you like and fry on medium to high heat for 3-4 minutes each side.
