Last month, at the dining table in a sunny New York City hotel suite, I found myself completely caught off guard by a piece of fake bacon. I was there to taste a new kind of plant-based meat. most americans, I’ve tried it before, but never really craving real meat the way I crave it. The smell of salt, smoke and sizzling fat rising from the nearby kitchen was undeniably real. Crispy bacon strips were also visible in the piece—tiger-striped with golden fat and presented in a miniature BLT. The unparalleled juiciness of sex fat followed.
I knew it wasn’t real bacon, but it fooled me for a second. Bacon was indeed plant-based, much like the burger patties you can buy from companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. But it was mixed with real pork fat. Well, hey. The marbled meat was not from slaughtered pigs but from live pigs whose fat cells were harvested and raised in vats.
This lab-grown fat, or “cultured fat,” was created by San Francisco startup Mission Burns with one purpose: to lure people to plant-based meat. It seems necessary to convince The plant-based meat industry, which a few years ago seemed destined for mainstream success, is now struggling.bleedingAccording to food analysts, plant-based meat’s high price, moderate nutrition and so-so taste make it hard for consumers to pass up. Many fast food chains (Burger King, Dunkin’, McDonald’s) that were serving national platformslost the desire to sellIn the past four months, two plant-based meat companies have Beyond Meat and Impossible Foodsrespectively announced their dismissal.
Meanwhile, the future of meat substitutes (meat that is molecularly identical to the real thing) is at least a few years away, sandwiched between science fiction and reality. But I can’t wait to eat meat until then.it is one of the single best The general public can do something for the climate and also help address animal suffering and health concerns. Lab-grown fat may be the bridge. It’s made using the same approach as lab-grown meat, but is much easier to make and can be blended into existing plant-based foods. , could be in production much sooner. Perhaps a small amount of animal fat is all that is needed to save fake meat.
Animal fats are culinary magic. It makes the burger juicy and leaves a buttery coating on the tongue.Its lack is why chicken breasts taste bland. Fat, wrote chef Samin Nosrat salts, fats, acids, heat, “a source of both rich flavor and a particular desirable texture”. The fake meats on the market today are clearly lacking in terms of flavor and texture. increase.It’s definitely meatier than the previous bean burger, but it’s far from perfect: food blog serious dietFor example, at least before cooking, he points out unpleasant flavor notes such as: coconut and cat foodAt the molecular level, vegetable fats are inadequate to mimic animal fats. Coconut oil, common in plant-based meats, is solid at room temperature but melts over relatively low heat, causing it to spill over the pan during cooking. I have.
A nonprofit that advocates meat alternatives, saying that replacing these vegetable oils with cultured animal fats that maintain their structure when heated would preserve the flavor and juiciness people expect from real meat. Audrey Jaa, a startup innovation specialist at the Good Food Institute, said: , said to me. The technology of using animal fats to flavor plants is not new in some ways. Chicken schmaltz has long provided a rich, nutty flavor to potato lakes.rendering Guanciale is what gives the classic Amatriciana That juiciness. Pork fat-enhanced plant-based bacon is based on the same culinary tradition, but very high-tech. Gives protein, other growth ingredients. Over time, they multiply and form clumps of fat cells. It is a soft, pale solid with a strong flavor, the same white substance found around pork chops and in marbling steaks.
The fat you get out of the bioreactor is “a bit like margarine,” Ed Steele, co-founder of Hoxton Farms, a London-based cultured fat company, told me. , much easier than working with cultured meat, which requires inducing many types of cells into hard muscle fibers. Fat he contains one type of cell and is most useful as a shapeless mass. Just like the human body, all it takes is time, space, and a steady drip of sugar, oil, and other fats. , consisted by curing and smoking bread and slicing it into bacon-like strips. You can get the feel closer to the real thing.
Cultured fat products are already on the horizon. Mission Barns plans to incorporate its own grown fats into its plant-based products. Hoxton Farms wants to sell its fat directly to existing plant-based meat manufacturers. Other companies, including Belgian startup Peace of Meat, Berlin-based Cultimate Foods, and Singaporean fish-focused ImpacFat, are also working on their own versions of cultured fat. In theory, fat can be mixed with virtually any kind of plant-based meat, including nuggets, sausages, and patties. In the US, the market is already open.Last November, farmed chicken from California startup Upside Foods FDA clearedwe are currently awaiting additional permits from the Department of Agriculture. Awaiting its own regulatory approval, Mission Barns says it is ready to launch the product in several supermarkets and restaurants. (Due to pending approvals, I had to sign a liability waiver before digging in.)
I put animal fat on my lips and stopped tasting it, with a new conviction in my mind: at the right price, I would buy more of this bacon than the regular one. Because it can be made without feeding, the fat cells in the bacon I tasted came from a happily free-range pig named Dawn, a PR rep for Mission Burns told me… less meat.
While there’s no guarantee it will taste just as good at home as when it’s cooked by Mission Burns’ own chef, cultured fats are a major problem plaguing plant-based meats because of their realistic texture and flavor. may resolve the Cultured fats are “the next step in making eco-friendly foods tastier for the average consumer,” said Jennifer Bartasius, a processed food analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
However, cultured fat faces some of the same problems that made America quit plant-based meat. We won’t change the facts. Building consumer trust and familiarity can also be a problem. some people cautious Because there is confusion about what plant-based products are made of. The more complex concept of cultured fat may be less appetizing, if not more: “We still don’t know exactly how consumers will feel about cultured fat,” he said. says Gyr. Sure, it’s helpful to find catchy names for these products, but to describe what I ate, I’d prefer a clunkier term than “plant-based meat flavored with grown animal fat.” I had a hard time finding it.blended meat– The plant-based protein and real meat mixtures introduced by three meat companies in 2019 were “a bit of a marketing blunder.”
Best of all is the price compared to traditional meat prices. The high cost of plant-based meat has been blamed in part for the industry’s slump, and products containing cultured fat probably won’t come cheap in the near future. did not share the same numbers. Mission Burns’ Fisher said only that the company’s small production scale makes it “quite expensive” compared to traditional meat products, but Steele said the plant-based meat recipe makes Hoxton We want companies using Farms’ cultured fat to succeed…they don’t have to spend more than they do now.
Despite these obstacles, cultured fat holds promise for the sluggish plant-based meat industry due to the fact that it is absolutely delicious. It can lead to great innovation,” said Bartashus.After all, real plant-based meat is Cost parity reached around 2026at that point, more companies may want to get into meat alternatives. Given enough time, a lab-grown chicken breast can be just as boring as a regular chicken breast.
The craze for cultured fat and fake meat in general has a decidedly techno-optimist flavor, as if it were easy to convince all meat eaters to embrace bacon-grease-braised vegetation. “Ultimately, it’s our goal to beat the current price of conventional meat, whether it’s meatballs or bacon,” Fisher said. , while meat consumption in the U.S. continued to riseGlobally, meat consumption in countries such as India and China is expected to soar in the next few years. At the very least, cultured fat gives consumers another option: eat steak at one meal and opt for plant-based meat at the next.
Since the tasting, I’ve often wondered why eating bacon made me so puzzled. But I was still scratching my head with the idea that it didn’t come directly from pork. If cultured fat is to overtake the plant-based meat industry and lab-grown meat becomes a reality, then these new products have done the job. In the meantime, we may find that they are already good enough.