Like chicken but tastier: Plant-based nuggets outperform chicken nuggets in world's largest blind tasting
Like chicken but tastier: Plant-based nuggets outperform chicken nuggets in world's largest blind tasting
It's all about selling the idea that you can do away with meat if you're a meat lover. For a lot of them, that's not going to happen by just saying "hey eat vegan food!"
But if you say "yo, taste this burger - whadayathink? I know right?!! Can you believe it's not made out of cow?!" Then maybe, maybe, the dude will say "you know what? For my next bbq Imma use impossi-burgers - damn tasty those thingies!"
if they keep trying to “replace” meats, they’re competing in a game they can’t win
Except they literally won, lol.
This is true for people who already are vegans. My sister tries to use less meat, and when she wants to cook something where she used chicken before, she buts the "vegan chicken" and so on. I love trying new and maybe weird stuff, but people with 40 year old habits are not gonne buy cube shaped mystery things that are sometimes more expensive than the meaty counterpart.
Facts, I've been saying this for a while. It seems to have worked for milk, people like oat milk despite it unabashedly not tasting like animal milk.
stop hurting animals
Are they cheaper?
The panel of 1,150 American omnivores liked nuggets from Impossible Foods, MorningStar Farms, Quorn, Rebellyous Foods and Simulate the best
It wasn't a single particular nugget, but an aggregate of vegan nuggets. And I can assure you, that Quorn and Morningstar are definitely cheaper than livestock chicken nuggets.
Not cheeper anyway. Less cheep. Dunno about the cost
Probably has more to do with spices than the chicken vs non-chicken. There are some incredible vegan-meat stuff out there because the spice game is 10/10. And I’m down for it.
Chicken smells awful to me, especially what they use for typical nuggets, plus I never really enjoyed those gross gristle bits.
Cooked, raw, or all of it? I like chicken but now I'm wondering if I like the smell of all the things we typically put on the chicken vs the chicken itself.
Cheap chicken nuggets are trash anyways. If you're buying cheap chicken nuggets, you may as well do yourself the favor of getting the ones made of tofu instead of chicken paste.
It's the breading and the deep friedness that makes it good.
This is my entire take on most veg meat replacements. I won't use substitutes in place of higher quality meat, but if I could I'd replace every single instance of low quality meat in my diet with some tofu/cauliflower/tempeh/whatever substitute.
It's like, I get the nostalgia of shitty chicken nuggets, but 0% chance of biting into a piece of gristle? Sign me up
Quorn is way better than tofu or what I assume is some form of seitan you get with some of these. It really is way better flavor and texture than even decent quality chicken nuggets.
There’s cauliflower “chicken” nuggets my girlfriend and I get often. They’re WAY better than chicken.
They do cauliflower Buffalo wings near my place. They're fucking delicious and just taught me the chicken is merely a substrate for the hot sauce and dip to live on. Plus no bones
That sounds good. With meat-alternative products I find they are incredibly polarized. Like they are either incredibly amazing, or they are nearly inedible
Tried looking them up for you, sadly it seems they’re not carried anymore. But they were called “Buffalo-Style Wings” by Target’s brand: Good and Gather.
This is them.
Alternative headline -
Plant based version of the absolute worst quality meat product is the only one from five that is preferable to the meat version, but only because it's deep fried and unhealthy
Come on guys
I mean nuggets, the ones that contain mostly "meat paste" and aren't high quality chicken breast strips, those don't taste really good at all, so shouldn't be hard to beat them, they are also not something you need to beat since they are just trying to use the whole chicken the less desirable parts so it doesn't go to waste.
I'd recommend this excellent video about jamie olivers war on nuggets
While I personally don't do well on a full vegan diet, the vegan food I like is it's own thing, not some terrible imitation of meat.
Indian vegan dishes are amazing for example.
Exactly. You can either use high quality natural ingredients or you can try to mimic them. With the exception of some dishes where say imitation ground beef works well, you're always better off highlighting plants and fungus in their natural form rather than trying to make them taste and look like something else.
Yeah, I think it’s a pretty strong argument that plant-based and lab-grown meat companies are making a mistake trying to beat the cheapest, lowest grade meat products such as chicken nuggets. You’ve got a hell of an uphill battle to engineer these things to be both cheaper and tastier than the meat ones.
The issue is that wealthy people (those most likely to be vegan) don’t buy these crappy products in the first place.
If instead they tried to beat high end products such as steaks or rare fish they’d have a much bigger margin for profit, after taking into account all the expensive R&D.
From the article "Though the taste of the average plant-based product “is meaningfully behind” the animal version, one notable non-nugget exception was a blended burger."
They aren't saying that plant-based foods are tastier than meat ones. Only that there's more of a desire for them from people because of them being plant-based.
It literally says that the only thing that people didn't completely think was inferior to meat was something blended with meat lol... Besides some nuggets, apparently.
I had some plant based nuggets and they were horrible! They had all the flavour and texture of chewing a cardboard box.
So colour me skeptical.
I had Franzia and it was horrible! Bitter and it took on plastic flavors from the bag it was stored in.
Colour me skeptical of wine.
Like drinking from a tire
I've had probably 4 or 5 different brands. Two of them were really good, the others were as you described.
A lot of them are shit, no question. They're made for vegans.
Do a taste test of a bunch of brands and find the right one for you.
I like impossible nuggs, and Gardein 7-Grain
I tried a few and i honestly can't tell them apart.
The vegan dino nuggets
I'm partial to the Impossible Spicy nuggets
The Simulate Nuggs are probably my favorite, mine come from Safeway.
Bon Appetit's crispy tofu nuggets recipe
Make them free for all. Solve hunger and reduce carbon emissions.
Our nuggies comrades.
Nuggets solving the climate crisis would be the perfect ending to the clown-era of humanity
Is that because normal chicken nuggets are so over processed now that they’re more easily defeated in taste tests?
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had “fake” chicken nuggets and they’re absolutely fine. I’d have them any time vs regular.
It's probably more that fake chicken in general has been really good for a while now, you'd be hard pressed to know it's not real chicken if you weren't told beforehand. My local shop puts most meat-free stuff all in one corner together, but meat-free chicken nuggets get to go on display next to the real stuff in the freezer section.
Red meat is the difficult stuff, most fakes aren't great and it's almost always easy to tell it's not real meat. When I feel like sausages I usually go for Richmond meat-free ones, I do like them but it's very obvious it's not pork. They have recently released cocktail sausages I love, though!
Aldi had some plant based nuggs for a bit that were by far the best nuggets I've had as an adult. Never seen them again though, sadly.
Same here. I don't know what happened. When they did sell them, I would occasionally see them out of stock, so I would have thought they were selling well. I would personally buy like 6 boxes at a time sometimes. I haven't found a good replacement.
I think some of these things are just repacked over runs of other products, so once the supply is out, that's the end of them. It does get frustrating when you try something, and when you go back for more, they're already gone.
I feel some of it is just because I can't get any more though. I really stocked up on the Herring from German week, and now I've only at like 2 cans of it. 😅
Those nuggets had the absolute perfect texture, tasted great, and I found them more filling as well. Would love for them to have some type of seitan nugget sometime as well. I'm sure they could get a good one.
Love me some fake chicken nuggies.
Been doing blind taste test every year and as real chicken nuggie companies cheap out, you can really taste the sadness. Fake chicken nuggets just taste more hefty.
What are the highly processed ingredients?
I wish I could still get Qorn nuggets locally. They're so damn good, like how good chicken nuggets tasted as a child. Honestly way better in every regard than an actual nuggie.
Qorn products aren't vegan, FYI.
Some of them are these days. Maybe 1/3 of the product line.
I remember buying some nuggets with a green filling and they were one of my favourite things to just pop in the toaster oven and eat while watching TV. I don't recall what brand they were but I can easily see how they could be perceived as tastier than regular nuggets. The problem is whether or not they're more affordable than chicken.
Edit: Veggie Patch Spinach Nuggets, I believe they were discontinued.
When i make enough money to only buy the things i use from sources i approve of we can revisit this. I'm not even the worst off as I've of the poors but until the majority of people can choose what they want this you might as well call it Supreme Nugs and charge accordingly
This is basically the Nirvana fallacy. While maybe you need to make some compromises (e.g few of us can afford clothing that likely doesn't involve child labour) you can make real, positive change. In clothing for example you can get second hand stuff, or just choose to have fewer items. Regardless of the difficulties with clothing nobody would say "I can't afford an ethical parker to survive winter, therefore I will punch a stranger in the face as you can't be perfect.
you can make real change, veganism is about what is practicable. Nobody expects you to die because the world is set up in fucked up ways and your BP meds were tested on animals or whatever but you can avoid animal products without perfect replacements. You don't need to replace chicken nuggets with plant nuggets, you can replace them with daal nutritionally...
There is no ethical consumption while living a capitalist way of life.
Hu?
Ouch. This post got nuked from space!
Those nuggets are barely chicken anyways. If they can make a healthier, tastier nugget then that's a win for everyone.
I bet they are not healthier.
They are not - they have super high sodium levels.