After swearing off meat, it could be hard for vegetarians to control their cravings when it comes to juicy, mouth-watering, bloody burgers. However, a biochemist from Stanford University invented a vegetable-based burger that looks, tastes and even bleeds like real meat.
Stanford professor and biochemist Patrick Brown created meatless veggie burgers as part of his start-up Impossible Foods, which aims to "recreate the wonderfully complex experience of meats and dairy products."
To create the meatless patties, Brown re-engineered the molecule heme that contains iron to make the burgers cook and look just like beef options.
Heme molecules, which are found in hemoglobin, come from the roots of nitrogen fixing plants. Providing another alternative to meatless eaters, the plant-based burgers look medium rare and look like they actually bleed.
"[Heme] is basically 99 percent of the secret to meat flavor. Heme is the molecule that makes meat taste like meat. It's the reason meat tastes like nothing else. It's the reason why red meat, which has more heme, tastes meatier to people than white meat," Brown says.
Food companies have been trying to focus on the market of meatless options, creating products kale burgers in an attempt to recreate the same texture of meat. Food companies have also produced meatless options like synthetic eggs made from pea protein and soy-based chicken products.
Brown says that the goal of Impossible Foods is to change the way people eat. "It has terribly destructive environmental consequences and many scientists and doctors believe it's intrinsically unhealthy to eat meat," Brown says. "We have to effectively reinvent a whole system for producing food— the end result being an unbelievably delicious product that can compete successfully against a product that people have loved for thousands of years," he adds.
The Impossible Foods meatless plant patties cost $20 a pop.
Brown's Impossible Foods recently received $75 million in funding from Bill Gates and Google Ventures.
