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Comment by novia | Hacker News Reader

I used to feel this way until I tried an impossible burger (1.0, I presume). I thought the only way to allow the more carnivorous of us to have a satisfying meal while eliminating animal suffering was to grow petri dish meat.

Impossible burgers seriously nail the taste and texture and nutritional proportions. It also seems like it will be much more cost effective to create them than the aforementioned petri dish burgers. When I tried an impossible burger it seriously made me excited for the future. The imitation meats from before had some serious problems, but just trust me, you need to try this one if you haven't already.

For context: I am a red blooded American meat eater.

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I find this interesting. I tried an Impossible Burger a while ago and I didn't find it to taste like meat at all.

Since they are only available in restaurants (until March 2019), this may have something to do with the preparation method used. I've read in reviews of the product that if you overcook it, such that all the pink color in the middle of the patty is eliminated, it does not taste as good.

I've had it in burger patty form on a bun with lettuce, tomato, pickles, ketchup, mustard, and mayo. I've also had it crumbled up in vegan lasagna. Both ways tasted great.

I have absolutely loved every impossible burger in patty form I've been served, it's certainly not fooling me as real meat but its good enough it doesn't have to, but every time I've had it crumbled its been dry and fairly unpleasant. You can definitely ruin it in preparation.

Makes plenty of sense. Real beef doesn't taste as good when you overcook it too.

If you were like me, you probably asked for it “medium rare”. That doesn’t really work with Impossibles, they need to be cooked “well done” to get that crust and avoid being mushy.

[edit] lol... okay next post contradicts my report... well anyway don’t expect the temps and results to exactly map would be my takeaway

My experience is that Impossible is better "medium rare" than most of the other ways of cooking it. A place near me serves it by default as a "steak burger", medium rare with fried onions and A1, and that does seem to play well to the strengths of the Impossible.

(On the flipside it does feel like the Beyond Burger is best a greasy "medium" or "medium well". The best I've had that served is in a vegan variation of a Big Mac. It's easy to get Impossible and Beyond confused, so maybe that's what you experienced?)

Ditto. But the restaurant wasn't exactly 5-star either. It seems they're not completely fool-proof for inexperienced cooks.

I've always found the impossible burger to taste 'too much' of umami to taste like a burger. This might actually be a good thing (this means it tastes delicious and meaty).

Out of curiosity, what eats more animals, humans or the rest of the animal kingdom?

Spiders consume twice the biomass of all adults on earth every year, so I think it's safe to say: Animals. Both in number as well as in weight, even if all humans adopted the US lifestyle (120kg meat/year).

Okay. I'm thinking that animal suffering ought not be the metric here, in that case.

Is the argument that suffering (even if only of animals) isn't worth reducing if we aren't the main source of it globally? I don't think we should use nature as the metric for morality, because a lot of really terrible things are very "natural".

Certainly we aren't going to "eliminate" animal suffering, the word the above comment used, but reduction is another matter.

Sorry for the weird use of language. I was thinking of animal suffering as an ingredient in the meal. Akin to how people say, "the secret ingredient is love."

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