Patrick Brown, a Stanford professor and biochemist, has concocted a way to make veggie burgers and meat burgers taste almost indistinguishable: plant blood, Grub Street reported on Thursday.
Brown's faux-blood looks just like the real thing, has the same metallic taste and is made from a molecule in hemoglobin that makes blood red and gives meat its distinct flavor.
Impossible Foods, Brown's three-year-old company, bioengineered the blood from plants. Its claim-to-fame is that now it has created a veggie burger that cooks, tastes and feels like its fleshy counterpart.
The company is part of a group of financially - backed startups looking to use plant matter to make alternatives to eggs, cheese and other foods that come from animals. They want to create a sustainable food source that isn't reliant on the trillion - dollar feed lot animal farming industry, according to MSN Money.
Impossible Foods and some similar companies have gained roughly $75 million in financing from Microsoft Corp. co-founder and billionaire Bill Gates, as well as numerous venture - capital firms.
Most of that money has gone to Brown's lab in Redwood City, Calif. It is there that spinach and other leafy vegetables are tossed into a large blender that breaks them down into plant proteins.
In another area of the plant, raw ground meat is cooked by machine and samples of smells are sent to scientists, who review and log each blast for its distinct characteristics. Tests in the lab are broken down into flavor, texture and smell tests, while other researchers are tasked with improving the processes' cost efficiency, according to Gawker via the Wall Street Journal.
The end result of the whole process is a dark red patty that could easily be mistaken for real beef. It has the same look and feel as conventional patties and even changes as it cooks; browning and caramelizing when tossed on the grill. But the taste is still up for debate: WSJ reporters said the bloody veggie burger tastes more like a turkey patty than a gourmet burger.
