I am not a Vegan ... But sometimes, you need to broaden your horizon.
Recently a danish company have made their attempt at a vegan friendly meat substitute. it is called "Naturli´" which is danish for natural.
It was quite heavily promoted in the media (both social and traditional) up to the launch, and I read about it in one of the free papers that are distributed in the trains. The good thing is thats it is availbale in a lot of stores across the country so you dont need to live close to a big city to try it out
I am usually not a big fan of food thats tries to be something else than it is. If you want to go vegetarian or vegan, there are plenty of tasty recipes to choose from in e.g. the indian cuisine and even in the danish traditional cuisine if you care to look a little further back than the seventies and eighties (in my opinion an alltime low for gastronomy in denmark)
Despite this, I decided to give it a try. Nutritionally it is quite close to what it tries to impersonate, which is minced beef . I also bought a package of real minced beef with a comparable fat percentage app 10 % in the vegan version and 9-15 in the meat version.
To make it a fair comparison I started out with burgers. It is a recipe where there are a lot of other stuff that compliments the meat taste so I thought if it would be usable for anything this would be it.
I made 6 of each (we make fairly small burgers with app. 80 g of meat).
First impressions:
the Naturli´ looked a lot like meat in the box. The colour was slightly paler but close enough that you could mistake it for meat at first glance. When I got it out of the box it was quite different in texture though. The Naturli´ felt more like cookie dough and it had a sticky surface which made it more difficult to make paddies.
Once it was on the frying pan it was also a bit more difficult than meat. It stuck to the pan more, so i would advice to be generous with the oil(I am assuming people would use oil since butter is nonvegan).
Taste:
In a burger it is actually quite difficult to taste the difference. The ketchup and pickles will have a tendency to overpower the fairly subtle meat taste, and I guess you could probably fool someone to think it was meat. My kids said it tasted a bit like liverpate, and I agree it does have a taste similar to what we in danish call "indmad" i.e. liver heart kidneys etc. .
It does feel quite dry compared to meat, but maybe that is because I gave it too much. I like my meat red, and I fried it for app. the same amount of time as the meat i used (which is not very long at all) but maybe it should be even shorter.
the day after , for my breakfast, I reheated one of the paddies to go with my fried egg and again it taste more like liver than meat, but does give a fairly convincing impersonation of something from an animal. This second heating did result in it getting a bit black, and it was quite dry, but that might be my fault, and anyways a reheated meatburger would probably ot be that juicy either.
Conclusion:
Well. I am not a vegetarian , or vegan, and I dont have any plans in that direction either, so for me I suppose it is just a slightly less palatable alternative to meat, but for someone who wants to go vegan but really miss meat , it might be an ok alternative.
Also if you take low-quality meat (like what you sometimes get in a burger joint) and compare to this product, it might be quite similar, so if the meat you are missing is the meat from a macDonalds hamburger go ahead and exchange it for this :-)
For something like a butter-tender steak, there is a long way yet before it is comparable though.
Im EvilHippie, a compulsive creative and jack o' trades. If you want to know more about me, check out my introduction post here
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