Sandwich of the Week is For The Win’s weekly celebration of sandwiches. If you have a sandwich you’d like to recommend, please direct it to the author’s Facebook page.
There needs to be a delicate balance here. Sandwich of the Week aims to celebrate great sandwiches, which for the sake of these pages means sandwiches that I know I love. But I also strive to keep these discussions fresh and vibrant, and that means I cannot write about a different breaded and fried meat on bread every single week.
I stepped slightly outside my comfort zone for this sandwich, the first vegetarian option presented in this incarnation of Sandwich of the Week. I happen to love meat, but I also happen to have a bunch of vegetarian friends and family members presumably unenthused by my hard-line carnivorousness. More on that in a bit.
The sandwich
The Impossible Burger with cheese from Momofuku Nishi on 8th Ave. and 22nd St. in Manhattan.
The construction
A plant-based protein patty purported to be the product of a “passionate team of scientists, engineers, chefs, farmers, foodies, and friends, all working to transform the global food system” by Impossible Foods’ website, served with American cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickle and special sauce on a potato bun. According to the site, Impossible Foods produces its product using 95% less land, 74% less water, and with 87% less greenhouse gas emissions than necessary for raising beef.
Important background information
People who love meat as much as I do often dig in behind that appreciation, and come up with all sorts of ways to justify eating so much of it. I can’t. While I believe there’s a great case that humans should be hunting and eating animals like deer to control their populations, I understand that most commercially produced meat represents a dangerously inefficient way for humans to be eating. Moreover, I like most animals way more than I like most people, and though I recognize we sit near the top of the food chain and our ancestors earned us these rights, it seems quite a bit presumptuous to assume the livestock we raise for the sole purpose of human consumption have no thoughts or feelings whatsoever, or that they deserve the lives we force upon them.
Which is all to say: I understand vegetarianism even if I refuse to practice it. I eat meat only because I love meat way, way too much to ever give it up — enough so that I am able to entirely ignore whatever societal and environmental guilt should come with my gluttony and get down on massive amounts of animal flesh practically every day. So if someone could come up with a meat-like substance that tastes as good as actual meat and doesn’t require the nurturing and slaughtering of so many delicious beasts, I’d be all about it. But that’s an enormous challenge, because, again, meat tastes so freaking good.
What it looks like
(USA TODAY Sports)
How it tastes
At first bite, familiar.
There’s little doubt that most people eating Impossible Burgers at Momofuku Nishi the day I went (and most people at Momofuku Nishi were eating Impossible Burgers the day I went) are those with a fondness for meat and without much experience in meat-like replacement proteins, so this makes for an incredibly well-conceived first foray into that world.
In short: It tastes a lot like a fast-food burger, particularly well executed. The bun, lettuce and tomato are so fresh that it’s significantly better than anything you’d get at the lower brow fast-food places, and instead immediately conjured the memory of eating at In-N-Out Burger — albeit with one fewer meat (or “meat”) patty than your standard double-double.
The Impossible patty is fairly thin, so it hardly makes for the dominant flavor or texture in this sandwich. That honor, as at fast-food restaurants everywhere, goes to the collection of toppings: It crunches like lettuce and it bites like pickles; the bun is soft with a pleasant sweetness, the tomato is juicy without a touch of mealiness. So this is, make no mistake, a very good sandwich.
But while the Impossible patty is on its own not bad, and while buried inside a pile of familiar toppings it presents an experience rather similar to that of enjoying an actual beef cheeseburger, upon closer scrutiny the imitation fails to match the original. It’s not nearly as dry as your standard frozen-in-the-box veggie burger, and, to be fair, it’s not really dry at all. But it can’t touch a good hunk of real meat for juiciness, either.
In texture, it reminded me more of scrapple (which I happen to love) than beef: The outside parts of the patty crisped up a little bit on the grill and had a vaguely beefy bit of chewiness to them, but the inside parts were a bit mushier. And while the patty tasted good and maybe even tasted vaguely meaty, it did not really taste like meat. Again: It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t beef.
Creating meat from plants seems a noble goal, and here it is fairly well accomplished. If someone decreed that all beef production must cease and we could only eat Impossible Burgers from here on out, I would more likely deal with it than start a revolution. But I’d certainly spend a lot of time bragging to future generations about how great it was to eat real meat. And in any situation wherein someone presented me the choice between a traditional burger and this one, I’d pick the former unless I also happened to be watching a sad cow on its way to the slaughterhouse.
Beef eminence remains.
What it costs
$13, and it came with fries. That sounds like a lot for not too, too much food, but it’s definitely a full meal’s worth of food and the price seems reasonable by ridiculous Manhattan standards.
The rating
73 out of 100.
