This Lab Made Veggie Burger Tastes Just Like Real Beef!

So here’s an inside view of the kitchen:

The cook with a hair net, gently lays the red patty on the grill and presses it with a spatula. You hear a sizzle, and a meaty aroma surrounds the room. She flips the patty and presses it again then pulls it off the grill and directly on to a bun.

This is no ordinary cook. She’s wearing not an apron, but in fact a lab coat and safety goggles, standing in a lab-kitchen hybrid in a Silicon Valley office.

Here a company called Impossible Foods has done something over the last six years which was not impossible but definitely unlikely: Engineering a plant-based burger that smells, tastes, looks, and even feels like ground beef.

This is the inside story of the engineering of the Impossible Burger, This is fake meat and is on a mission to change the world with one part soy plant, one part genetically engineered yeast—and one part activism.

Lean, Mean Heme Machine

What makes a burger a burger? The smell, for one, and taste and texture, all working in concert to create something animal like. It’s loaded with all manner of proteins that interact and react with each other in unique ways.

Impossible Foods thinks the essence of meat lies in a compound called heme, which gives ground beef its color and slightly metallic taste due to iron in the heme molecule. This same molecule is in blood as hemoglobin and in muscles as myoglobin.

For the yeast, scientists take the genetic code for the soy (leghemoglobin) protein and insert them into a species of yeast called Pichia pastoris. They then feed the modified yeast sugar and minerals, prompting it to grow and replicate and manufacture heme with a fraction of the footprint of field-grown soy.

Recreating The Exact Aroma

To piece together a plant-based burger that’s identical to beef you need to identify and recreate as many of those flavors as possible. To do this, Impossible Foods is using what’s known as a gas chromatography mass spectrometry system.

This heats a sample of beef, releasing the aromas onto a piece of fiber. The machine then isolates different compounds similar to those aromas.

Chewy like Actual Beef

Then there’s texture, nothing feels like ground beef. They choose specific ingredients to make it feel like real beef.

The ingredients include wheat protein, to give the burger that firmness and chew you get when you eat red meat. There’s also potato protein, which allows the burger to hold water and transition from a softer state to a more solid state during cooking.

For fat, Impossible Foods uses coconut with the flavor sucked out. And then of course you need the leghemoglobin for heme, which drives home the flavor of the “meat.”

Not Coming to Pakistan Any Time Soon

For something that so accurately mimics the taste, look, feel and the smell of meat (and trust us, it does), the Impossible Burger is actually not all that complex. The impossible good burger isn’t widely available as till yet except in a few restaurants.

We’re guessing impossible foods took a serious turn on the average veggie burger, but we’re also not sure if it competes with our desi anday Wala burger.