What’s Really Inside a Meatless Burger?
Plant-based patties are great for the environment. But what about for your body?
A few years ago, chef Paul Canales was curious about the new and mysteriously meaty meatless burgers that were creeping onto the food scene. Products like the Impossible Burger were harder to get back then, but Canales managed to secure 20 pounds to play with at Duende, the Spanish restaurant he runs in Oakland, California.
“I wasn’t happy with it as a burger, so I came up with this idea of making a meatball,” Canales recalls. He added cumin, garlic, and parsley and fried the “meat” into something resembling Spanish-style meatballs, calling his creation albondigas improbables (improbable meatballs).
“People loved them. They’d get two or three orders at a time,” Canales says. The chef had a hit on his hands, but he was bothered that he didn’t know exactly what he was serving.
“You can’t really identify vegetables in it at all,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’m selling a ton, but am I really providing nutrition to people?’”
Canales isn’t the only one wondering about the nutritional value of products like the Impossible and Beyond burgers, which have officially gone mainstream now that McDonald’s and Burger King have added them to their menus. While…
