The Impossible Burger: A Game-Changing Alternative to Traditional Beef Burgers

The Impossible Burger is a plant-based alternative to traditional beef burgers that has gained significant attention in recent years. According to David, who has been cooking with the burger, it's virtually identical to traditional beef burgers in terms of its nutritional content. In fact, the Impossible Burger contains slightly higher protein content and has the same iron content as traditional ground beef. However, it also has a slightly lower calorie count and lower fat content, making it a more appealing option for health-conscious consumers.

One of the key features of the Impossible Burger is its ability to mimic the taste and texture of traditional beef burgers. David notes that the burger's secret ingredient is a type of plant-based protein called "heem," which provides the necessary umami flavor to create a meat-like experience. To achieve this, the company uses a combination of ingredients such as kimchi, mustard oil, and algae-based compounds to create an emulsion that's remarkably similar to traditional mayonnaise.

Despite its impressive nutritional profile and taste, the Impossible Burger has been the subject of some skepticism among consumers. Some have questioned how it could be possible for a plant-based burger to contain meat-like flavor without actually containing meat. However, according to David, this is where his expertise comes in. As someone who's spent years perfecting their craft, he knows that the key to creating a truly convincing meat substitute lies in using familiar ingredients in new and unexpected ways.

David also notes that the Impossible Burger has been the subject of some surprise reactions from consumers who have eaten it without realizing what they're eating. He recalls an incident where someone found a burger on their kitchen counter and devoured it without realizing it was made from plant-based ingredients. This experience is not unique, however, as David notes that many people have discovered the Impossible Burger without realizing its true nature.

In terms of environmental impact, the Impossible Burger has been studied extensively by David's team. According to their analysis, eating a Quarter Pounder-style burger from Impossible Foods instead of one made from traditional beef saves greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to driving 18 miles in a typical American car. Additionally, it uses significantly less water and land than traditional beef production. This makes the Impossible Burger an attractive option for consumers who are looking to reduce their environmental footprint.

The Impossible Burger is also set to debut on the menu of several high-end restaurants, including Nishi and Chelsea, starting at noon tomorrow. Fans of the burger can look forward to experiencing it in a restaurant setting, where they'll be able to see firsthand how David's team has managed to create a truly convincing meat substitute. As for now, however, David is happy to have shared his expertise with the world through this article and invites readers to try the Impossible Burger at home.

Overall, the Impossible Burger represents a significant breakthrough in plant-based cuisine, and its potential impact on the food industry cannot be overstated. By using familiar ingredients in new and unexpected ways, chefs like David can create dishes that are not only delicious but also environmentally friendly and sustainable. As we look to the future of food production, it's clear that innovations like the Impossible Burger will play a significant role in shaping our culinary landscape.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome we are live here at munches in Williamsburg at Vice HQ and I'm in such good hands I'm here with three wonderful food gentlemen so we've got Patrick Brown CEO and founder of impossible Foods a man who kind of needs no introduction but I'll do it anyway David Chang chef and founder of Moma fuku and Rudy executive chef of sambar Matt rudol you just cuz I call him Rudy I mess it up forever he told me I had to call him Rudy he paid me it's easier that way such a handsome man and I'm about to taste the first ever plant-based Burger which bleeds I mean I didn't just make that up that's Verbatim what it is so I mean look I'm a meat eater what what am I sell it to me well about a year ago before I'm going to let Pat explain and then I'll let Pat explain because this is why I was so surprised by how delicious it was so when I read about it I was like I need to find out more about this thing cuz I'm always keeping my ear to the ground about all the new and delicious things whether the meat or non- meat and um it took me a while to find a way to actually taste it and then uh I didn't know what to expect having had some meat substitutes over the you know my lifetime I've never been that enamored um and then when we cooked it I saw that it cooked a lot like meat and tasted a lot like beat and it was was just you know supremely delicious and my mind exploded and then having spoken to people like Harold McGee who is is a friend and and and and uh advocate of this as well I knew that the science worked and and then that's when I I met big man himself and he explained to me sort of the the the mission behind impossible food and the burger and I was very excited about it so was the mission to create as you said a a plant-based burger that really does you know mimic meat the beef burger uh yes that's part of it the the mission of the company uh came out of the fact that um you know this the way that we produce meat right now using animals uh puts a tremendous strain on the global ecosystems that sustain life on Earth uh and yet billions of people uh more and more all the time love meat and can't imagine life without it uh so we have to resolve that dilemma and I had uh a realization uh five years ago that um that there was a probably a solution to the problem and the solution basically was to uh come up with a better way to produce meat that was sustainable uh nutritious affordable but most of all uncompromisingly delicious to the hardest critics the hardest meat lovers uh we could imagine people like David because nobody likes to feel guilty about enjoying no a great hamburger no and and and part of our mission is to is to eliminate any possibility of guilt and um anyway when I realized that I quit my job at Stanford and uh founded impossible foods and we're of and running wow yeah and so what what do you mean it bleeds what are we looking at they these look like raw beef patties to me yeah what you're referring to is to solve this problem we first had to get a really deep understanding of what makes meat delicious which turns out to be uh actually quite a hard scientific problem to solve but one of the things that that we discovered is critical is that uh U meat has a very high level of a particular molecule called heem hemoglobin or it's so um it's familiar to most people as uh the molecule in your blood that carries oxygen that has the iron and uh and gives your blood its red color it turns out it's also uh for our purposes even more important uh it's what gives meat its unique meaty flavor it's the bloody Taste of raw meat uh and the explosion of flavors and Aroma um during cooking are all chemistry that's catalyzed by heem so how do you did you get vegetables to do that well um well before before that I I think that was like the very significant thing because a lot of people obviously in the industry have tried to make meat substitutes or just understand meat in general um I know as chefs we tried to always appreciate how to make meat more delicious I think Pat was the first person to actually asked the question of how to reverse engineer why do people even enjoy it and the heem is really I think the Breakthrough that uh I think only he could figure out that the justos of all the compounds and he was explaining to me all the without getting too technical because I'm not a scientist and nor did I go to Stanford uh he's a pretty good science that's that that was something that I think wasn't alluding it just people weren't even asking the right question and when I figured out that's what was going to unlock sort of a whole new level of understanding and culinary ideas I was like this is going to be delicious and it's something I would definitely have to stand behind so what's making it that color well that's the the uh the he is uh like I said it's it's it's what gives your blood its red color it's what gives meat its red or pink color and it's uh the exact same molecule um that gives our Burger its pink color and he is in every living cell it's not unique to meat it's just super abundant in meat so we can actually get from plants in this case we actually um produce it by uh fermentation with yeast okay brilliant and can I expect it to like seep uh yeah and if if you cook it medium rare as uh I don't know how you're planning to cook it uh well what would you recommend I usually go with the chef's recommendation David David is the chef and I I I'll let him uh well he has an opinion about so how do you like your burger like a a regular burger pretty rare pretty rare yeah but maybe when you go to a fast food establishment do you do you care so much sometimes right so it depends even you on your mood can have a a thick Patty or thin Patty and I think what's interesting about a burger is I think for all the data out there no one there's no consensus about how Burger should be of course um so I think that it depends like I like this burger medium to medium well I'm just going to interrupt you cuz I just got a whack of meaty like smell is someone pumping someone cooking a burger somewhere something different my my joke is if it's really high quality Burger I'll go medium rare if I'm a little skeptical I'll go medium to medium well but for this one I like I like I like medium on this cuz I think it you can get a really nice crust on this burger without needing really high heat and then you just you get that combination of a little bit of a chew and the crunch from the crust yeah and it depends on the on the on the thickness if we really mashed it down like the ones I made earlier today were just thinner okay right so there is no Rhyme or Reason I think it's a personal preference uh you know there's a there there's a there's a critical point that uh David was making and and it's it's part of what we built into the burger which is that we want the cook the chef to be able to cook it to their liking which means that uh for example we've served it as tartar uh so you can eat it just raw and when we were in Paris for this big climate event uh uh we served a lot of tartar a lot of parisians and it was a it was a huge hit because that's what they like in Paris but um but if you like it uh medium you can cook it medium if you like it well done you can cook it well done the chemistry is the same as happens in meat so you you get the same result some Voodoo we've got going look at that when you taste it raw tastes to me are you familiar with Umami and yeah so it tastes like an Umami bomb right uh even raw so um and you're getting a lot of the the the sort of the the same cooking prop properties of a a real ground beef patty wow and the flavors in meat and in our Burger basically uh come from hundreds of compounds that are produced by chemistry during cooking um where uh the precursors are just amino acids and sugars and F things that are just in every basic simple molecules of life but in the presence of he and the heat uh they get transformed into this explosion of and and how how does it compare like nutritionally to to beef patty what am I eating obviously when I think about I'm eating a beef patty I'm getting protein fat iron yeah um what what am I eating what's it do say it's it's nutritionally it's in most respects virtually identical to the same burger from a cow it's got um actually a slightly higher protein content High bioavailability protein it's got the same iron content highly bioavailable iron it's the same form of iron heem iron uh it's got uh slightly lower calories than the typical ground be Burger um because it's a slightly lower fat content no cholesterol uh and uh has anybody ever been fooled into thinking it meat well as far as yeah I mean we we we've we don't as a matter of policy we don't try to trick people because if someone happened to be allergic to any of the plant ingredients uh would be irresponsible but but it's happened many many times uh that people have eaten our Burger without without realizing what they're e eating in fact there was a a an anonymous very well-known figure that I just heard about yesterday found some sitting on her uh kitchen counter and scarfed them down uh and thought she'd been eating meat until she was informed that uh wow something else and how are you serving them so we've got some kimchi going on here so we a little bit of kimchi but we've done this one without some of the products you typically find in traditional kimchi like fish or shellfish and instead to sort of create that fermented flavor we use some of um the Koji from our food lab and use that to sort of create that fermented umami flavor without using uh fermented fish really just like a spicy sour CRA ex like that and then we sort of made our um uh Sam sauce special sauce uh which is basically our s sauce that we use at the restaurants and then we basically made an Emulsion using some mustard uh oil and then instead of using egg as an emulsifier we used uh some algae based compounds to create the emotion wow and just so I feel extra virtuous when I bite into this how am I saving the Planet oh so glad you asked that question so um if you choose um so we've done an extensive life cycle analysis uh looking at uh all the environmental impacts of our burger and comparing it to the same burger from a cow and to sum it up basically if you eat a qu pound impossible Burger instead of a qu pound burger made from a cow you save greenhouse gas emissions that are equivalent to driving 18 miles in a by yourself in a typical American car uh you save water that's equivalent to taking a 10-minute shower or more water than you would drink in a couple of months and um you save a land area of uh you free up a land area of 75 square feet that uh is what the difference in the land area to produce this from a cow as opposed to the way we do it that's land that can be used for wildlife habitat and other purposes so it's restoring uh a natural environment in that sense yeah okay where do I sign let's do it too good thank you ruy so much for cooking this for us okay I yes all right here we go actually the best part is I got try Fin and most of these ingred I don't know if you can tell but it is kind of reading most of these ingredients I mean we have in our own restaurants so they're just naturally occurring the only thing that is uh I we couldn't make is the the discovery of the he that impossible makes right this is kind of freaking me out this is like which some witchcraft you've got going on here it's actually if you'd seen the uh we did did the demo earlier today see all the ingredients that go into as David was saying they're all things that you would find in his kitchen um with the exception of the heem just simple familiar ingredients that have been used by you know food cultures for thousands of years A Thousand Years some it's just knowing which exact ones to use and uh exactly how to put them together that makes the difference and and it's very much like what David does you know anyone can probably take the same ingredients that David uses in his restaurant and produce something that's barely edible uh if you if you know what you're doing and you do it right you produce something that's you know transformative yeah this is impressive you've you've broken you've broken through this is crazy I think we might have to have seconds so um you might have to leave us to some more cooking thank you so much I feel honored and spoiled to have tried this and guys this is apparently coming to a restaurant near you soon very tomorrow at Nishi munishi and Chelsea uh we start at lunch at noon okay at noon right the the the first uh to be served on the regular menu of a restaurant will be I guess shortly after afternoon at Nishi so if you want one show up early okay I've got to stop talking with my eyes my mouth full thank you so much thank you pleaswelcome we are live here at munches in Williamsburg at Vice HQ and I'm in such good hands I'm here with three wonderful food gentlemen so we've got Patrick Brown CEO and founder of impossible Foods a man who kind of needs no introduction but I'll do it anyway David Chang chef and founder of Moma fuku and Rudy executive chef of sambar Matt rudol you just cuz I call him Rudy I mess it up forever he told me I had to call him Rudy he paid me it's easier that way such a handsome man and I'm about to taste the first ever plant-based Burger which bleeds I mean I didn't just make that up that's Verbatim what it is so I mean look I'm a meat eater what what am I sell it to me well about a year ago before I'm going to let Pat explain and then I'll let Pat explain because this is why I was so surprised by how delicious it was so when I read about it I was like I need to find out more about this thing cuz I'm always keeping my ear to the ground about all the new and delicious things whether the meat or non- meat and um it took me a while to find a way to actually taste it and then uh I didn't know what to expect having had some meat substitutes over the you know my lifetime I've never been that enamored um and then when we cooked it I saw that it cooked a lot like meat and tasted a lot like beat and it was was just you know supremely delicious and my mind exploded and then having spoken to people like Harold McGee who is is a friend and and and and uh advocate of this as well I knew that the science worked and and then that's when I I met big man himself and he explained to me sort of the the the mission behind impossible food and the burger and I was very excited about it so was the mission to create as you said a a plant-based burger that really does you know mimic meat the beef burger uh yes that's part of it the the mission of the company uh came out of the fact that um you know this the way that we produce meat right now using animals uh puts a tremendous strain on the global ecosystems that sustain life on Earth uh and yet billions of people uh more and more all the time love meat and can't imagine life without it uh so we have to resolve that dilemma and I had uh a realization uh five years ago that um that there was a probably a solution to the problem and the solution basically was to uh come up with a better way to produce meat that was sustainable uh nutritious affordable but most of all uncompromisingly delicious to the hardest critics the hardest meat lovers uh we could imagine people like David because nobody likes to feel guilty about enjoying no a great hamburger no and and and part of our mission is to is to eliminate any possibility of guilt and um anyway when I realized that I quit my job at Stanford and uh founded impossible foods and we're of and running wow yeah and so what what do you mean it bleeds what are we looking at they these look like raw beef patties to me yeah what you're referring to is to solve this problem we first had to get a really deep understanding of what makes meat delicious which turns out to be uh actually quite a hard scientific problem to solve but one of the things that that we discovered is critical is that uh U meat has a very high level of a particular molecule called heem hemoglobin or it's so um it's familiar to most people as uh the molecule in your blood that carries oxygen that has the iron and uh and gives your blood its red color it turns out it's also uh for our purposes even more important uh it's what gives meat its unique meaty flavor it's the bloody Taste of raw meat uh and the explosion of flavors and Aroma um during cooking are all chemistry that's catalyzed by heem so how do you did you get vegetables to do that well um well before before that I I think that was like the very significant thing because a lot of people obviously in the industry have tried to make meat substitutes or just understand meat in general um I know as chefs we tried to always appreciate how to make meat more delicious I think Pat was the first person to actually asked the question of how to reverse engineer why do people even enjoy it and the heem is really I think the Breakthrough that uh I think only he could figure out that the justos of all the compounds and he was explaining to me all the without getting too technical because I'm not a scientist and nor did I go to Stanford uh he's a pretty good science that's that that was something that I think wasn't alluding it just people weren't even asking the right question and when I figured out that's what was going to unlock sort of a whole new level of understanding and culinary ideas I was like this is going to be delicious and it's something I would definitely have to stand behind so what's making it that color well that's the the uh the he is uh like I said it's it's it's what gives your blood its red color it's what gives meat its red or pink color and it's uh the exact same molecule um that gives our Burger its pink color and he is in every living cell it's not unique to meat it's just super abundant in meat so we can actually get from plants in this case we actually um produce it by uh fermentation with yeast okay brilliant and can I expect it to like seep uh yeah and if if you cook it medium rare as uh I don't know how you're planning to cook it uh well what would you recommend I usually go with the chef's recommendation David David is the chef and I I I'll let him uh well he has an opinion about so how do you like your burger like a a regular burger pretty rare pretty rare yeah but maybe when you go to a fast food establishment do you do you care so much sometimes right so it depends even you on your mood can have a a thick Patty or thin Patty and I think what's interesting about a burger is I think for all the data out there no one there's no consensus about how Burger should be of course um so I think that it depends like I like this burger medium to medium well I'm just going to interrupt you cuz I just got a whack of meaty like smell is someone pumping someone cooking a burger somewhere something different my my joke is if it's really high quality Burger I'll go medium rare if I'm a little skeptical I'll go medium to medium well but for this one I like I like I like medium on this cuz I think it you can get a really nice crust on this burger without needing really high heat and then you just you get that combination of a little bit of a chew and the crunch from the crust yeah and it depends on the on the on the thickness if we really mashed it down like the ones I made earlier today were just thinner okay right so there is no Rhyme or Reason I think it's a personal preference uh you know there's a there there's a there's a critical point that uh David was making and and it's it's part of what we built into the burger which is that we want the cook the chef to be able to cook it to their liking which means that uh for example we've served it as tartar uh so you can eat it just raw and when we were in Paris for this big climate event uh uh we served a lot of tartar a lot of parisians and it was a it was a huge hit because that's what they like in Paris but um but if you like it uh medium you can cook it medium if you like it well done you can cook it well done the chemistry is the same as happens in meat so you you get the same result some Voodoo we've got going look at that when you taste it raw tastes to me are you familiar with Umami and yeah so it tastes like an Umami bomb right uh even raw so um and you're getting a lot of the the the sort of the the same cooking prop properties of a a real ground beef patty wow and the flavors in meat and in our Burger basically uh come from hundreds of compounds that are produced by chemistry during cooking um where uh the precursors are just amino acids and sugars and F things that are just in every basic simple molecules of life but in the presence of he and the heat uh they get transformed into this explosion of and and how how does it compare like nutritionally to to beef patty what am I eating obviously when I think about I'm eating a beef patty I'm getting protein fat iron yeah um what what am I eating what's it do say it's it's nutritionally it's in most respects virtually identical to the same burger from a cow it's got um actually a slightly higher protein content High bioavailability protein it's got the same iron content highly bioavailable iron it's the same form of iron heem iron uh it's got uh slightly lower calories than the typical ground be Burger um because it's a slightly lower fat content no cholesterol uh and uh has anybody ever been fooled into thinking it meat well as far as yeah I mean we we we've we don't as a matter of policy we don't try to trick people because if someone happened to be allergic to any of the plant ingredients uh would be irresponsible but but it's happened many many times uh that people have eaten our Burger without without realizing what they're e eating in fact there was a a an anonymous very well-known figure that I just heard about yesterday found some sitting on her uh kitchen counter and scarfed them down uh and thought she'd been eating meat until she was informed that uh wow something else and how are you serving them so we've got some kimchi going on here so we a little bit of kimchi but we've done this one without some of the products you typically find in traditional kimchi like fish or shellfish and instead to sort of create that fermented flavor we use some of um the Koji from our food lab and use that to sort of create that fermented umami flavor without using uh fermented fish really just like a spicy sour CRA ex like that and then we sort of made our um uh Sam sauce special sauce uh which is basically our s sauce that we use at the restaurants and then we basically made an Emulsion using some mustard uh oil and then instead of using egg as an emulsifier we used uh some algae based compounds to create the emotion wow and just so I feel extra virtuous when I bite into this how am I saving the Planet oh so glad you asked that question so um if you choose um so we've done an extensive life cycle analysis uh looking at uh all the environmental impacts of our burger and comparing it to the same burger from a cow and to sum it up basically if you eat a qu pound impossible Burger instead of a qu pound burger made from a cow you save greenhouse gas emissions that are equivalent to driving 18 miles in a by yourself in a typical American car uh you save water that's equivalent to taking a 10-minute shower or more water than you would drink in a couple of months and um you save a land area of uh you free up a land area of 75 square feet that uh is what the difference in the land area to produce this from a cow as opposed to the way we do it that's land that can be used for wildlife habitat and other purposes so it's restoring uh a natural environment in that sense yeah okay where do I sign let's do it too good thank you ruy so much for cooking this for us okay I yes all right here we go actually the best part is I got try Fin and most of these ingred I don't know if you can tell but it is kind of reading most of these ingredients I mean we have in our own restaurants so they're just naturally occurring the only thing that is uh I we couldn't make is the the discovery of the he that impossible makes right this is kind of freaking me out this is like which some witchcraft you've got going on here it's actually if you'd seen the uh we did did the demo earlier today see all the ingredients that go into as David was saying they're all things that you would find in his kitchen um with the exception of the heem just simple familiar ingredients that have been used by you know food cultures for thousands of years A Thousand Years some it's just knowing which exact ones to use and uh exactly how to put them together that makes the difference and and it's very much like what David does you know anyone can probably take the same ingredients that David uses in his restaurant and produce something that's barely edible uh if you if you know what you're doing and you do it right you produce something that's you know transformative yeah this is impressive you've you've broken you've broken through this is crazy I think we might have to have seconds so um you might have to leave us to some more cooking thank you so much I feel honored and spoiled to have tried this and guys this is apparently coming to a restaurant near you soon very tomorrow at Nishi munishi and Chelsea uh we start at lunch at noon okay at noon right the the the first uh to be served on the regular menu of a restaurant will be I guess shortly after afternoon at Nishi so if you want one show up early okay I've got to stop talking with my eyes my mouth full thank you so much thank you pleas\n"