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Comment by L_Rahman | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading the original impressions of the Impossible Foods ground meat and thinking it was just media buzz.

I promise you it is not.

At Momofuku's Ssam Bar in the East Village of NYC, you can order an off menu item called Spicy Pork Sausage and Rice Cakes. It's not really off the menu - the item has simply been around so long and is so well known to regulars that they left it off to make room for new dishes.

I've had it more times than I count.

At lunch time however, they serve Spicy "Impossible Sausage" and Rice Cakes. The first time I ordered it, I was ready to complain about one of my favorite things ruined by a hyped product.

But then I took my first bite, and it somehow tasted better than the pork sausage version. I've been back many times since and the Impossible Foods version of the dish is often tastier than the pork version.

Let that sink in for a moment. Impossible Foods was able to replace high quality pork sausage served in a beloved dish at one of New York's buzziest restaurants and make the dish better.

The vast majority of ground meat in the American food chain is of lower quality. If Impossible Foods can replace that ground meat at scale, the ramifications are enormous. They will reduce by a huge margin the number of animal lives and quantity of CO2 necessary to feed us.

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This is a neat comment, but as someone who's been to a couple different Momofuku places (incl. Ssam Bar) but never had that dish: how heavily spiced is it? The dish is inspired (simultaneously) by Mapo Tofu and Bolognese --- it's supposed to literally be Ssam Bar's take on Mapo Tofu --- which suggests to me that the quality of the pork is probably not all that important to the overall dish.

A good hamburger, on the other hand, relies almost entirely on the flavor of the beef.

There's an informal rule in cooking about how the simpler a dish is, the better your ingredients and technique have to be, because there's nothing to hide behind.

That really depends on the type of burger. Occasionally, I enjoy a good In n Out Burger. I don't expect their meat quality is particularly good.

"Patty melt" style burgers are generally less reliant on meat quality as long as you can get a good, crunchy, umami seat on the thin mean patty or patties.

I suspect the thicker higher end style burgers would be more reliant on the quality of the beef.

However, for economic reasons, they are probably the necessary target of impossible meat until they reach a scale large enough to compete with cheap beef.

In-n-Out burger patties are never frozen and the chain has a number of high-profile chefs as fans. Their beef may be ground and it's fast food, but McDonalds it ain't.

Freezing isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for burger patties with a good amount of fat. I'd rather have that than something that's been sitting around in the fridge for too long. As long as it's frozen very quickly and defrosted properly, freezing is fine.

In-N-Out meat is pretty good; it's just super thin. McDonald's is not good, but believe me, if McDonald's had a good burger patty, and if they wanted to freeze it, it wouldn't be any worse for it.

On the other side of things, In-N-Out doesn't freeze their fries, and they're much worse than the frozen fries from places like McDonald's or Shake Shack's crinkle-cut fries, and it's specifically because they don't do the fry-freeze-refry process critically important for great fries.

The critical thing about great fries is that they are fried twice, once to cook the potato and the second time for the crispy shell. The freeze step in the middle is likely just for transportation logistics.

While the double frying is critical, the freezing step in the middle is not just for logistics. The fries are better when they're frozen post-initial fry. I make fries all the time from scratch, and I always throw them in the freezer before the second fry. The final product is better than when I don't freeze between fries. Freezing helps add irregularity to the surface and aids in crisp them up post second fry.

> Freezing the potatoes causes their moisture to convert to ice, forming sharp, jagged crystals. These crystals damage the cell structure of the potato, making it easier for them to be released once they are heated and convert to steam.

from http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/05/the-burger-lab-h...

Yeah, you can buy those all-natural 100% potato french fries from the supermarket and fry them into something truly fantastic. When restaurant fries taste "frozen" it's because they're not being refried well.

Who freezes ground beef before turning it into a world-class hamburger? What's the best frozen hamburger I can buy?

> Who freezes ground beef before turning it into a world-class hamburger? What's the best frozen hamburger I can buy?

I do, because I'm not a restaurant, and I don't buy enough meat for one or two servings of hamburger. If a restaurant's been around long enough and has enough turn over, they won't have my problem, but a place could want to freeze for time reasons, or to help with getting a gnarly crust by cooking it from frozen, etc. If you're freezing with the kind of thing the NYC sushi guys use (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/nyregion/sushi-fresh-from-...), and defrosting properly, a truly great hamburger could easily be made from a frozen patty.

I've never heard of a good prefrozen hamburger patty unless you're getting something from Snake River Farms or something along those lines (they ship frozen meat). I freeze my own.

When I don't want to take the time to grind my own meat I have the butcher do it for me. I don't know any restaurants that incorporate freezing to improve quality, only to lower costs.

It comes down to logistics. Maybe I'm a smaller restaurant, and I want to serve BBQ or fresh bread. Might not be feasible for them to smoke a brisket every day if they're not a brisket place, but you can definitely freeze some brisket and bring it back to life in pretty good quality. It doesn't improve it, but it lets a restaurant serve something that they otherwise couldn't.

Same goes for fresh bread. Maybe they want to serve pastrami sandwiches in Manhattan, but the best rye bread they can find is in Detroit, and so they have their baker freeze the bread and ship it over. It's not that the bread is better because it was frozen, but they're able to get better bread because they could freeze it.

You definitely cannot freeze cooked barbecue brisket and bring it back to life at adequate commercial quality. You can freeze raw brisket, but that doesn't solve the core problem of serving barbecue brisket, which is that it takes so long to cook that you have to either be really good at predicting your turnover or close up early when you run out.

Long story short: freezing brisket, not a great plan.

You certainly can freeze barbecued brisket and bring it back to life in great shape——I've done it plenty of times. It took a lot of trial and error, but it's not impossible. I'm not cooking a 18 hour brisket just to eat a quarter pound of it and toss the rest.

Yes, these are examples of people maximizing for a variable other than quality. The linked study indicates that the freeze-thaw cycle has significant negative effects on the quality of ground beef. I believe ground meat is probably more damaged by freeze-thaw than whole cuts of meat.

https://www.dti.dk/_/media/66980_Effect%20of%20packaging,%20... (PDF!)

The methodology used for that paper makes it irrelevant for a discussion of optimizing the quality of frozen items——the packaging, the cooked burger doneness (167F), and the fat percentage are all significantly different from what would be used in a high-end commercial setting. I've been saying that a great burger could be cooked with a frozen patty (and you could even freeze the bun as long as you don't freeze them together), not that the freezing itself improves the quality of the meat for typical burger metrics of quality (with the exception of crust formation, which could be much better potentially if cooked from frozen).

Freezing food has a stigma that it doesn't deserve if the freezing and thawing is done with care. As I mentioned before, the best sushi restaurants in Manhattan all freeze their fish and store it in extremely cold freezers, and there's no significant detriment to quality. If Shake Shack wanted to do so, they could freeze their patties, and they'd still have one of the best restaurant burgers out there. They certainly would not be freezing their meat in the way that was done in that burger paper, nor would they be using meat of that quality.

Freezing has nothing to do with meat quality. It's the source of beef that matters.

You're absolutely correct.

1. It's unlikely that Impossible Foods will ever match the quality of a grass-fed, grain-finished 80/20 chuck + short rib blend from a purveyor like Pat LaFrieda.

2. The dish is heavily spiced and the Impossible Foods product is playing the role of the bolognese. It can hide under the seasoning and spices.

3. I still think the product is valuable. The vast majority of meat product Americans consume meets a much lower bar. I think Impossible Foods already makes a product that's better than the ground meat that goes into a lot of fast food chains. If you didn't tell people, I suspect they'd prefer a Taco Bell or White Castle product made with Impossible Foods instead of the "mix" that they currently use.

I tried the Impossible Meats burger - it was nowhere near as tasty as a beef burger. I think it could be improved drastically by just adding a little MSG tho.

Time to bust out that jar of msg then, or just eat it with seaweed instead of lettuce or something.

I'm thinking a black and blu burger. Most of the flavor comes from the Cajun spice and the blue cheese so all it has to do is get the mouth feel right. It's the burger Turing test.

Most burgers are improved with MSG, it is a miracle salt.

And msg is generally considered safe these days?

It's never not been safe.

wrong, this is what they used to synthesise MSG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile

I believe some MSG is still made with this and causes migraines and other heart issues, it's mostly phased out though, and can cause mixed reactions as the type of MSG isn't labelled, let alone MSG.

Your link has no mention of the subject being directly used to manufacture MSG, and only mention a link to glutamic acid being used for syntheses of it. This is not adequate evidence that Acrylonitrile was ever present in commercial MSG.

there are two known methods, acrylonitrile and bacteria as per this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Productio...

>this and causes migraines and other heart issues

Until you can provide a shred of evidence for that I will assume you're just adding a layer of legitimate-sounding abstraction to the same superstition. Toxic precursors =/= toxic end products. This is chemistry, not alchemy.

It's probably not harmful

http://theconversation.com/mondays-medical-myth-msg-is-a-dan...

http://www.businessinsider.com/is-msg-sodium-in-chinese-food...

Pretty much.

Is MSG safe to eat?

FDA considers the addition of MSG to foods to be “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS).

https://www.fda.gov/food/ingredientspackaginglabeling/foodad...

I think of it like gluten, or lactose, for most people its fine, but some people definately don't tolerate it and only they need to avoid it. If you have the enzymes required to process it then you're fine, if your genetics are missing something required for processing it then you'll have problems.

just like people with Phenylketonuria and aspartame. Aspartame contains Phenylalanine and can cause issues for some, and it varies from product to product (quality standards). I used to have issues from drinking cheap diet cola.

It's ben heavily studied for decades and the whole msg scare has no science to back it up. It's possible that some people have a sensitivity to MSG, but for >99.99÷ of the population, it's completely safe.

I buy shakers of it, it can be delicious in some meals.

MSG is Monosodium Glutamate, the sodium salt of glutamate. Glutamate is an amino acid common in food, I assure you you eat tons of glutamate on a daily basis. There's nothing inherently unsafe about it, and your body knows exactly what to do with it. In fact, your body is literally made with it.

That said glutamate is a neurotransmitter, so yeah you probably shouldn't inject large quantities or anything.

MSG itself is not a problem. Actually, it is so good, you can use lowest quality products, add some MSG and still get tasty meals. I avoid MSG precisely for this reason - I try to eat quality food and you may never know what's behind it when MSG is used.

Do you also avoid salt,because literally the exact same reasoning could be used for salt or any spices

If food in a restaurant is too salty or spicy, I accept that as a signal that chef might be trying to hide something. Contrary to the salt and spices, the problem with MSG that it's hard to tell how much of it was used just by tasting, that's why I try to avoid it at all. I do use salt and spices when I cook at home, but then I rarely have to question the quality of products used. For example, when I cook burger from quality beef, a pinch of salt and black pepper is all I need, then why do you think McDonald's etc. use MSG by the handfuls?

A friend in LA got my brother and I to try impossible burgers (he's pescatarian, I'm vegawarian): we agreed it was not that great.

What does vegawarian mean?

A shibboleth

I assumed it was a typo, but apparently its an actual term. Basically vegetarian-friendly. Sounds a bit buzzword-y, but I like the concept.

https://www.greenprophet.com/2009/01/vegewarianism/

I'm aware vegetables are better.

I also had the Impossible burger and was not impressed - to me, it was too greasy, and didn't have any real flavor of its own. I would not order it again for pretty much any reason - I actively disliked eating it.

I just want to point out that there are lots of ways to get umami. MSG is just one of them (and not really a great way IMHO).

I cooked vegan at home for a long time (I'm not actually an ethical vegan, I just like vegan food). Konbu dashi will give you similar glutamate profiles, but tomatoes, fermented products like shoyu and miso, etc are simple ways to boost the umami as well. Usually the biggest trick in good vegan food is to understand how to balance all of the flavours. Meat based cooking has so many savoury flavours, and if you simply cut out the meat, you end up with overly sweet/sour dishes. They lack depth. If you're designing a dish and you are waiting until the end to figure out how to get the umami in (for example, by adding MSG), then you're really not going to succeed most of the time IMHO. If I want a savoury dish, umami is where I start.

Having said that, I've never made a vegan burger style dish that I've thought was particularly good. I've had some excellent vegan dishes like that at restaurants and I've always wondered how they did it. Since MSG triggers migraines in me, I'm pretty sure it wasn't MSG :-)

MSG consumption has never been linked to physical symptoms in a double blind test.[0] It's an abundantly occurring natural amino acid. Kombu dashi is one of the foods where the flavor of MSG was originally identified as umami because it contains MSG.

[0]http://www.fda.gov/food/ingredientspackaginglabeling/foodadd...

MSG can be made using toxic chemicals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile

I make a black bean / brown rice / sweet potato with cumin vege burger that tastes pretty good

Most of the things you list as MSG alternatives actually contain MSG; like tomatoes, konbu dashi, and many fermented products.

Yeah, a lot of times you'll see MSG in ingredients lists as "hydrolysed vegetable protein", or "hydrolysed soy protein". And that's exactly what you're getting in soy sauce, or tomatoes, or konbu dashi -- naturally produced MSG.

One is L-shaped (artificial and flavour enhancing) the other is natural.

http://science.jrank.org/pages/4433/Monosodium-Glutamate-MSG...

Since when is "natural vs artificial" evidence of relative healthiness, or even a logical basis for comparison at all? You have numerous comments in this thread all drawing on the same fallacy that some MSG can be "good" and some can be "bad" when that is inherently impossible.

Producing a URL with the word "science" in it ending in .org is not sufficient evidence. Find a single empirical datapoint or published study, otherwise stop spreading fearmongering speculation. Do you concern yourself with which table salt to buy because it may be "bad NaCl"?

Surely the flavour enhancing one must be the natural one, or else meat wouldn't have the umami taste, or am I missing something?

it's all about the quality of the MSG and the manufacturing standards. if you added MSG to foods yourself, you'd know which brands to use or avoid.

When visiting Europe I had a similar experience with "Seitan" [1] based sausages.

I quickly realised that what I like most about sausages isn't really the animal fat / flesh, it's the wheat, barley and or other spices + salt fried in oil that I enjoy. I should also add the texture which was easily reproduced with Seitan.

Also I found Seitan cheese burgers to be really, really good.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_gluten_(food)

Do they still offer the sausage? I'd love to try it when I visit NYC.

I think the way it breaks a part has always made me lean towards it being served as a bbq pulled pork slider. I didn't think about how it would taste as a "sausage".

I've felt like vegetarian hot dogs tasted the same (indistinguishable) or better as regular hot dogs for a while now.

I'm a little more skeptical of "pork" substitutes simply because lard makes everything taste better. Split pea soup vs split pea soup with coppa. Regular pie crust vs lard crust. Plain pizza vs with prosciutto. Risotto vs risotto w pork fat (or goose fat). For all of these there's no contest (for me).

I live literally a block away from Ssam bar--I'll be going in tomorrow for lunch to try this out. Thanks for the tip!

I'm afraid they've taken the Impossible Foods version off the menu :(

They do they same pork version at both lunch and dinner now. I'll ask why they switched next time I stop by.

Aside: I too live very close to Ssam Bar and would be happy to get a coffee in the neighborhood. If you're interested, contact info is in my profile.

I too live nearby and would love to try the non-processed food version.

How do you know for that sure it will reduce the number of animal lives and reduce CO2? Farming the plants needed to produce this fake meat takes up land, potentially (and most likely) more land needed to produce equal amounts of meat.

Unless they are running a completely solar operation and managing their farms using a system of rotational grazing that sequesters CO2, they most certainly are emitting it.

I see this as only mildly better than CAFOs. Employing holistic management techniques is still the best, and unfortunately, under appreciated way to produce meat in an ethical, sustainable way that also generates new fertile soil and sequesters carbon/methane as a side effect.

Are you sure? Cows eat plants. The footprint from cows is largely due to the fact that you need 14 pounds of grain per pound of cow, if I remember correctly. Unless these burgers are somehow taking 14 pounds of grain to produce per pound of burger, I think we're in a better place.

That said, eliminating cows I still don't think will help the environment. That freed up land will be bought and used for some other purpose. It's natural capitalism. If you want to fix the environment, you need heavy penalities / taxes for nonsustainable resource usage. That's the only way.

Cows don't need grain. Grain feeding is part of industrial meat production that is highly detrimental to the environment. Feeding cows grass (and rotating them) though has the total opposite effect. It creates soil that can hold more water and sequester carbon. So it eliminates the need for grain production because cows simply eat grass while naturally fertilizing it.

Huge fan of a carbon tax.

No way anyone can feed cows on grass alone if you want to earn big bucks or feed 200M their daily beef steak.

Do you have data comparing profits from CAFOs vs grass-fed operations? Wouldn't grass fed sellers earn more as it's a premium product?

How did the North American plains support millions of bison just on grass at one point?

Bison are easier on the grass than cows.

One problem is of course that few places are good enough carbon sinks to make grass fed beef even close to co2 neutral.

A better idea would be less regular manure and more humanure.

The other purpose beeing green fuels? Im okay with this.

>potentially (and most likely) more land needed to produce equal amounts of meat

Please explain this in more detail.

>and sequesters carbon/methane as a side effect

I have not heard of a farming practice that sequesters methane released from ruminants. Can you provide more information?

>>potentially (and most likely) more land needed to produce equal amounts of meat

>Please explain this in more detail.

Sure! Plants are much less nutrient dense that animals. So for them to create fake meat that's equally nutrient dense as real meat, their farms have to be adequately large. You need a ton of plants to achieve the density of meat. Animals on land however are already nutrient dense. The only physical space they need is enough room to graze.

>>and sequesters carbon/methane as a side effect

>I have not heard of a farming practice that sequesters methane released from ruminants. Can you provide more information?

Scientists and farmers in this area can do a much better job explaining it than I [1], [2], [3].

[1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z75A_JMBx4

[3]: https://vimeo.com/80518559

You should become familiar with the energy pyramid. It's an order of magnitude more efficient to extract energy from plants than to pass the plant energy through animals first. https://www.brainpop.com/science/energy/energypyramid/

You're right that animal-based foods are much more calorie-dense than plant-based foods. But an animal contains roughly 1/10 of the calories of all the plants that collectively went into feeding it.

The animal's only energy source is plants. Some portion of that energy goes into producing muscle and organ tissue. Some of it is converted to heat. The rest is used for respiration, digestion, thinking, walking around, dreaming, and all the other ongoing processes of life. Animals don't undergo photosynthesis, nor do they spontaneously generate energy.

Unless there's something else you're getting at here. Energy loss and trophic levels is a pretty well-understood idea.

http://kids.britannica.com/students/assembly/view/90132

Admittedly, there is a bit more nuance to the issue; for example, a cow can produce milk and meat from grass, which, for humans, creates available nutrients where there were none before. However, we could also plant that field of grass with corn or potatoes and get many more calories for the same amount of water and sunlight.

I've studied the amount of energy and water necessary to produce beef extensively, both at university and professionally, and I can say from experience that it would be extremely difficult for something like the impossible burger to consume more energy and water than the equivalent amount of actual meat.

Meat is expensive in energy and water because it takes huge amounts of vegetable matter and water for a period of _years_ to get to a point where it's consumable; by contrast, said vegetable matter can be produced in typically less than one year.

Did you study industrial beef production or grass-based holistic management? As far as I'm aware, the latter isn't taught at schools (yet). Although the technique is very old, and based on nature's natural cycle of herd movement, it only caught on again in the early 2000s.

How will said vegetable matter get it's nutrients year after year as the soil it's growing on gets eroded? Wouldn't external fertilizer, pesticides, etc need to be brought in? Doesn't creating that expend huge amounts of energy on it's own?

To be honest, it doesn't make that much of a difference when we compare the cost of calories from vegetable matter to the cost of calories from meat (and, when we're talking about a few ounces of organic matter for a burger, that is basically what we're talking about).

Sure, you have to worry about soil erosion, but by the same token you have to consider the fact that a single cow has a large grazing area. Fertilizers, pesticides etc. are optional but not strictly required, and again don't really change the bottom line.

Could you please enlighten me on how land gets fertilized on it's own without grazing herbivores to create a proper soil micro-biome?

Sure cows need grazing land, but they don't require all the external inputs an industrial soybean farm, for instance, needs. All they require is land, sunlight, electric fences, and some water if rainfall is inadequate or the soil is in bad shape due to prior mismanagement or desertification.

You're saying grazing is zero input but e.g. a soy bean farm is not. This whole comparison is off.

A soy bean farm is a bad idea, firstly. To maintain balance, you wouldn't just want to farm soy beans.

Next, grass doesn't just magically appear. It too needs nutrients.

Cow manure is one way to improve soil nutrients, but Permaculture shows us many more ways to keep the cycle flowing.

In the end, the best picture is actually that the cows grazing and the soy beans exist together in a larger system of many other products that work together in providing nutrients that the others need.

Cows, though, are ultimately unnecessary for a Permaculture style system, and we can grow food without them. Then they can just be there as our friends and participate in our agricultural systems as fertilizers, if circumstances happen that way.

Everything I'm talking about is based on Permaculture. From the Wikipedia page on Permaculture [1]:

Animals, domestic or wild are a critical component of any wild or designed sustainable ecosystem. Research indicates that without the animal’s participation and contribution, ecological integrity is diminished or impossible. Some of the activities that contribute to the system include: foraging to cycle nutrients, clear fallen fruit, weed maintenance, spreading seeds, and pest maintenance. The nutrients are cycled by animals, transformed from their less digestible form (such as grass or twigs) into more nutrient-dense manure.

Fertilizer requires manure. Without manure you need synthetic fertilizer, which breaks the natural feedback loop and no longer good Permaculture practice.

Sure grass doesn't magically appear on it's own, but it can when you rotate some ruminants around from paddock to paddock. I have a friend who has a business doing this. She drives around a truck full of sheep and revitalizes land that has been turned to desert due to overgrazing or mismanagement [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

[2]: http://brittanycolebush.com

>Could you please enlighten me on how land gets fertilized on it's own without grazing herbivores to create a proper soil micro-biome?

You just keep their shit, let it decay, microorganisms flourish, and then spread it over the fields. Also switching plants regularily helps keeping decent amount of nitrogen in the soil.

>Sure cows need grazing land, but they don't require all the external inputs an industrial soybean farm, for instance, needs

This only works for extensive breeding, which is no more than 20% in the usa [1]. Sure, these eat hay in the winter, but thats not sufficient to keep animals fat enough. Inside their diet basically is the same as others, which is 50kg of corn silage, and some 2-5 kg of dehydrated soy protein. Per day. Good luck producing as much waste as a cow during her life time.

nb : I live and studied veterinary medicine in Europe, where we don't grow soy and import it from south america mostly (USA grows a lot already, idk if its autosufficient though). So yeah, deforestation exists so we can eat beef :)

1 - http://www.beefusa.org/beefindustrystatistics.aspx " feedlots with greater than 1,000 head capacity account for 81% of all cattle on feed". These mega farms don't do extensive breeding.

> How will said vegetable matter get it's nutrients year after year as the soil it's growing on gets eroded?

1. It won't be eroded if you practice good farming, e.g. Permaculture 2. The meat industry is horrendously worse at regeneration of land than the worst farm practices 3. How else do you expect nutrients arrive in soil? It's a process that happens naturally very easily and just needs to be managed

> Farming the plants needed to produce this fake meat takes up land, potentially (and most likely) more land needed to produce equal amounts of meat.

And it will often take up land that is more fertile, and as such has a higher biodiversity cost, than what is needed for grazing animals (which can be done on land more barren or harder to farm).

It is often forgotten that you can herd animals in ways that coexist with the rest of the ecosystem, while farming plant based food (especially products like grains or soy) requires you to raze all existing life in the area you wish to use for farmland reducing it to a monoculture with no room for diversity.

(But it should be made clear that this only counts for grazing animals. Industrial meat production where you feed the animals grains gives you the worst of both worlds).

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