I married a vegan, and I eat a lot of vegetarian food. (I also still eat plenty of meat, just not every day.) One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. A familiar refrain I've heard in restaurants in the last few years is "we used to have a nice veggie patty, but they replaced it with the beyond/incredible/whatever patty.…
Exact opposite. I ask them to please not bring me a mashed vegetables patty and call it a burger. It is not. The idea of a lettuce tomato onion burger stack on a bun is that there's a taste and texture contrast between the stack of vegetables and something that's not another stack of vegetables but mashed. (Doesn't mean it has to be Beyond or Impossible, see last para.) I suspect displacement happened because folks p…
I can agree that "mashed vegetables" does not describe a good veggie patty. I don't agree that a good veggie patty fails in "burger" format.
I can easily imagine that some people have simply never tasted a good veggie patty in "burger" format, because they are rare.
This is the root of most "meat alternatives" in average restaurants -- much of the restaurant world hasn't figured out that providing vegetarian options isn't about finding equivalent "meat replacements" but instead about cooking up options that stand on their own and taste great.
> While Impossible and Beyond displaced the meat alternatives
In my experience the "meat alternative" patties have not displaced the good veggie patties in the restaurants that had good veggie patties to begin with.
> ...that doesn't mean you have to go meat in a vat at home, you can do products such as Morningstar Farms Grillers Original, or maybe Boca All-American Flame-Grilled Burger. Those taste stack more reasonably with what goes on a burger than the mashed vegetables patties, without the weirdness (fake blood look, why?) of Impossible or Beyond. Your local diner will probably be happy to stock them as they're simple frozen goods.
A beef burger patty has the wonderful property that it is simply made of meat -- a good beef patty has no ingredient lists because it isn't a packaged food.
A good veggie patty is also made on site of simple whole foods, in the same way a good burger is and in the same way any other good meal is.
Any frozen puck taken from a bag and slapped on a grill fails the test, be it comprised mostly of beef, soy, beans, "beyond beef", wheat, or whatever. Those things are about convenience, not taste.