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Comment by jluxenberg | Hacker News Reader

They serve this patty at Umami Burger in SF. We tried it a few weeks ago and everyone was really disappointed. It definitely doesn't bleed. It's cooked well-done and can't be ordered any other way. The taste is similar to a well-done beef patty.

I'd love to try the burger they're describing here. Maybe the product is difficult to work with and Umami is unable to get these results? Or maybe they're describing some version 2.0 Impossible patty that isn't available yet?

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It's my understanding that the Impossible burger _has_ to be served medium-rare; otherwise, you're boiling off all the myoglobin (the stuff that makes it taste meaty) and just tasting the pea protein (the stuff that's in every other veggie burger). It's unconscionable that they'd serve it well-done. (Though knowing Umami Burger, I'm not exactly surprised.)

I had it at Momofuku and it was medium rare. Similar to this example I found on Google Images: http://imagesvc.timeincapp.com/?q=60&url=https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us...

It was nothing special, but was a convincing meat substitute. I'd be happy taking it over any kind of fast food burger.

I'm surprised David Chang let this burger onto his menu.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-meat-of-the-...

I also tried it at Umami Burger, but mine was cooked medium. It dripped pinkish juice similar to a medium-cooked burger. I found it surprisingly close to the real thing. Most people would guess correctly in a blind test, but if you served it to an unsuspecting person, they'd probably think it was the real deal.

One caveat: I may not be the best judge of accuracy. I eat meat maybe once every three months (usually by accident or because my alternative is to go hungry).

Gott's at the Ferry Building has it so I'd gone once to try it. It was pretty good, and not well done. I'm only an occasional beef eater (a few times per year), so I don't have a super sensitive palette to compare to.

I think the mistake was making it well done. I've had it, and my take away was "good". Not nearly as good as grass fed beef, but better than fast food. Probably just below 5 guys.

This is definitely an Umami Burger problem. I've had it there and at Cockscomb down the block, and it's infinitely better at the latter location.

> The taste is similar to a well-done beef patty

Isn't this basically the goal?

I think he didn't want it well done.

Are you interpreting "well-done" to mean tasty, high quality, etc?

It means overcooked to the point the meat is completely gray. Highly undesirable to many (though preferred by some).

OP said they ordered it well done (because there were no other options). So if it tasted like a well-done beef patty then I'd call that a success.

If the OP didn't like it because they don't like well done burgers in general then, well, I'm not sure what they were expecting when they ordered one.

They said they didn't have any choice in how it was prepared, and the restaurant picked "well-done" — but yes, I would call that a success for Impossible. Just because Umami Burger prepares the burger poorly doesn't mean the burger failed, since it tastes as good as a normal meat burger would be expected to when prepared the same way.

> If the OP didn't like it because they don't like well done burgers in general then, well, I'm not sure what they were expecting when they ordered one.

What OP actually said:

"It's cooked well-done and can't be ordered any other way."

OP didn't order it that way, Umami Burger won't cook it any other way.

I'd guess they aim at the low-price market eventually. If they can scale it well enough it might become cheaper then real meat for mc donalds and than at will be huge!

Ground beef should be cooked until there's no pink.

https://www.foodsafety.gov/keep/charts/mintemp.html

And then promptly thrown in the garbage.

If you've got an argument, make it. Pink ground beef isn't safe. https://www.foodsafety.gov/keep/charts/mintemp.html

Food that is edible but unsafe vs food that is inedible but safe.

In my case it's been safe enough to eat for 40 years without incident. Not even pink, but bloody dripping red.

It's not the color, it's the internal temperature. Not necessarily correlated...

it's temperature * time, actually.

Do you like your pork cooked until grey? I've seen it.

Properly cooked pork (not ground pork!) should actually be slightly pink in the middle (like with a pork chop). Anything more is overcooked.

/most people have no clue how to cook pork...

Chef here.

I grind my own beef, and there is no way I would want to eat a burger pattie cooked well done.

If you are worried that your mince may not be safe to eat - why the hell are you buying it?

Just to be clear, it's far less safe to eat ground beef rare than a steak. With a steak, potentially harmful bacteria are all on the outside, which you sear. So the interior can be practically raw and the steak will be safe to consume. If you grind it up, the outside is now mixed into the inside.

One cool trick to get around this is to cook the beef sous vide. Beef can be pasteurized at as low as 130 F as long as it's held at that temperature for long enough. That's basically medium rare.

less safe, but not far less safe. since 1998, there have been less than 400 deaths from foodborne illness in the united states. 12 of those were from ground beef. Your risk is utterly negligible.

You might still be right, but safety for many isn't about merely not dying.

Alright, there are ~5000 cases of foodborne illness since 1998 in this report, ~600 resulting in hospitalizations. ~1 in a million over 20 years

“CDC estimates 48 million people get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases each year in the United States”

I was only talking about ground beef, but perhaps I am using this tool incorrectly?

https://wwwn.cdc.gov/foodborneoutbreaks/

The tool seems to be dealing with reported outbreaks only. The total illnesses in the outbreak tool over that time period is at 370K, but the cdc reports 48M foodborne illness cases per year, so totally different scale

Ok, clearly I am drawing the wrong inference from this tool, but I think the point still remains valid. insofar as it matters whether your beef was ground, the statistics you should care about are outbreak statistics. The reason that ground beef is less safe than steak is that pathogens from thousands of cows are evenly distributed among the entire slurry. This would absolutely be captured in outbreak statistics.

After the relevant processing, the argument for cooking burgers to 160 is no different from the argument to cook your lettuce to 160.

True, however death is not the primary worry of anyone who thinks they have have eaten undercooked meat. People are generally more worried about just getting sick.

if you're worried about just getting sick, the odds are more like 2/100000 per 20 years from ground beef, although I trust these numbers less, despite being from the CDC.

These numbers do not come from the CDC:

“https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/index.html”

Don't put urls in quotes!!

https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/index.html

Another key here is that commercially packaged ground beef does not come from one cow. It comes from around 400 cows.

I had the same experience — a charred puck. I actually returned the first one but the second wasn’t much of an improvement. Earlier in the month I spoke with one of IB’s execs and he said that each restaurant was preparing them differently.

It's getting a pretty good response at Kronnerburger in Oakland.

+1 had it at kronnerburger and thought it was great. They said it's easy to screw it up and end up with a crappy burger.

In contrast, we tried this at Gott's at the Ferry Building (in SF), and were all content. How the kitchen preps food is always a factor.

The Impossible "meat" was unlike other veggie patties. If you had served this to me in McDonald's, I wouldn't have thought twice.

They have it at Cockscombe in SF and apparently it's better there. Maybe try your luck again?

Weird, I've had it at the Umami Burger in Santa Monica and it was definitely not well done and was a pretty passable burger. The one exception was a single bite on a single patty did taste really strongly of sea-weed but other than that it was pretty good.

It bleeds raw, but I honestly like it better when it's cooked well-done.

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