April 1, 2019 is a special day. On this day, Burger King suddenly announced: we are going to start selling artificial meat burgers! At the beginning, everyone thought it was an April Fool's Day joke, but soon people found that burger king was serious! They launched this "impossible whopper" in 57 stores in St. Louis, USA. If it sells well, this hamburger will be sold to more than 7200 stores in the United States!
How is the "artificial meat" hamburger realized
Vegetarian meat vs cell culture meat
Burger King's Royal burger, called 'artificial meat' burger, is not accurate enough, because the so-called 'artificial meat' can actually refer to two completely different things.
In the first category, we prefer to call it "plant-based meat". It is a kind of meat like food that uses plant materials to imitate the flavor, taste and even nutritional value of meat.
In order to meet the new trend of vegetarianism, all kinds of vegetarian meat, eggs and milk have been developed. Vegetarian meat is one of the fastest growing categories. It has completed industrialization and become an industrial food that can be bought everywhere.
The two major vegetarian meat companies in the United States are beyond food and impossible food. Their products can be bought not only in supermarkets, but also in hamburger stores.
The second type is called 'lab grow meat'. It uses cell culture technology to directly culture muscle cells and fat cells of animals, and then collect the food formed by cultured 'meat'. 'test tube meat 'is real meat. It's just that it's not grown on animals. It's grown in Petri dishes.
'test tube meat 'is still in the laboratory stage, and there is still a certain distance from industrialization.
Burger King's "artificial meat" belongs to the category of "vegetarian meat". It is a kind of vegetarian meat based on pea protein, which is designed by the company of impossible foods. So it's more accurate to call it 'vegetarian burger'.
How is vegetarian meat designed
When it comes to vegetarian meat, it looks like the wisdom of our ancestors, because we often see vegetarian meat, chicken, abalone and other ingredients in vegetarian restaurants. In fact, as early as the Song Dynasty in China, Tao Gu recorded the diet culture of using tofu as vegetarian meat in the book of Qing Yi Ji.
These foods, we can call it 'vegetarian meat 1.0'. Their concept is the same as the vegetarian meat we are talking about today. They all use plant materials (mainly soybeans) to imitate the taste of meat as much as possible.
But today we're going to talk about vegetarian meat 2.0. Although it comes down in one continuous line in concept, it is subversive in sensory experience. With the blessing of food science, 'vegetarian meat 2.0' is enough to achieve the level of 'taking the fake as the real'.
How does it work? Let's take Burger King's "vegetarian Burger" as an example, which is simply four words: reverse engineering.
The first step of reverse engineering is to select the right combination of protein and fat to achieve the flavor and taste of protein and fat in beef.
For this purpose, impossible foods has set up a 'chemical resource bank', in which there are countless kinds of plant proteins and fats. Their scientists try them one by one, just like Edison tried the filament. In the end, the best combination was created by them: pea protein as protein, coconut oil as fat, the effect is the best.
This alone is not enough. In order to imitate the taste better, some modified wheat starch and potato starch are added to the vegetarian Patty to make it taste more natural.