The Reason Some Vegan Alternatives Don’t Taste Like Meat
Some of the qualities that make meat “meaty” are hard to reproduce with plant-based alternatives. Should we be focusing on replicating them – or trying to make new, tasty alternatives?
Considering the environmental impact of the meat industry, and growing appetite from consumers for plant-based foods, you might wonder if we will soon have a vegan alternative for every animal product. From “bleeding” burgers to vegan fish skin, some new products try to emulate the experience of eating the real thing.
But there is a lot more going on with meat products than just taste and texture. What do we still have to perfect? And is there any meat that may never be replaced with a vegan alternative?
Perhaps the most realistic way to recreate a meat without the carbon footprint will be to grow it in a lab. Cultured meats – meat grown in labs from cells – would use far less energy, land, water and produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional meat, and they are the subject of extensive international research. But even cultured meats are some way off being convincingly meat-like, let alone commercially available.
But increasingly researchers are experimenting with how to give lab-grown meat a more realistic texture.
In 2021, researchers from Osaka University in Japan produced a cultured wagyu beef steak by 3D-printing muscle, fat and vessel cells in gel which were then assembled by hand. The finished steak measured 5mm by 10mm.
Prized for its marbled appearance, wagyu beef has a high concentration of fat. The cattle are raised in conditions that mean they use less energy and are fed for longer than other breeds to achieve the desired high density of fat tissue, which gives the meat a buttery flavour. The slow process, and the fact that wagyu beef has protected status, means that the meat commands a high retail price.
“But [cultured meat] production is so small, and right now it’s so expensive – we cannot make them on a large scale,” says Mariana Lamas Bezerra, a research assistant at the Centre for Culinary Innovation at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Canada.
Although it scores better on measures of sustainability, cultured meat is also not commonly considered vegan. There are two ways in which it is made: by taking muscle tissue from an animal carcass and then separating it into muscle satellite cells, adult stem cells and multipotent stem cells, or by inducing animal cells to turn into pluripotent stem cells, and culturing new cells from those. The medium in which the cells are cultured also contains horse serum, which is taken from horse blood.
But could we recreate something as prized as a wagyu beef steak without needing to use any animal products? Could vegan alternatives ever be as convincing as the real thing?
Animal proteins and plant proteins behave quite differently. You only have to think of the experience of eating veggie burgers made from beans and chickpeas, for example, says Lamas Bezerra. “They do not have the chewy, bouncy texture of a meat burger – they’re often a bit mushy,” she says.
Few plant products have the same fibrous, chewy texture of a whole cut of meat, but one exception is jackfruit, which when unripe is fleshy like pork or chicken. It’s one of the most popular source materials for vegan meats – but even this would be difficult to piece together into a whole steak, says Lamas Bezerra.
When cooked, plant and animal proteins do different things, too.
The Maillard reaction is what gives cooked foods their savoury smell and flavour, and brown colour. Although not only a reaction that occurs in meat products (it occurs during the brewing of beer, coffee and production of chocolate or bread, for example), it partly explains why the whiff of a BBQ or a waft from a takeaway is so appealing.
The meaty aroma comes from the release of compounds like thiazoles or thiophenes during roasting or grilling – these can be found in plants too
When heated to a high temperature, amino acids and sugars on the surface of food rearrange themselves, and in doing so release flavour and aroma compounds. The higher the concentration of protein, the more flavour compounds are released, and the higher the sugar concentration, the more aroma compounds there will be. Temperature (and also things like water content) is key to this reaction. Imagine the difference between a sausage boiled to 100C and one lightly charred on a hot grill. Both would be safe to eat, but only one is really appealing.
The way that week cook our food can help to release delicious aromas and flavours (Credit: Getty Images)
To achieve the same release of aroma and flavour from plant proteins, they also have to be heated to a high temperature. Cooking at high temperatures reduces the nutritional content of all foods, particularly levels of B and C vitamins which are found in both animal and plant products. So, plant-based meat products might be tasty, and grilling them might help release some meaty aromas, but they are not necessarily as good for you as the veg they’re made from.
Animal-based fats have a unique profile that is hard to replicate with plant-based fats. Animal fats are mostly saturated, meaning they melt at higher temperatures, for example, whereas most plant-based fats melt at lower temperatures, with a few exceptions.
Coconut oil and palm oil are two of those exceptions, and they are often used in vegan dairy alternatives as a result. But vegan cheeses have a different flavour profile and texture to most dairy cheeses – vegan fats are arguably more convincing in soft cheeses than hard cheeses (vegan, floppy, sliced burger cheese is indistinguishable from the dairy alternative).
We use dairy in a whole host of ways that might be suitable for swapping out with plant-based alternatives
But we use dairy in a whole host of ways that might not be immediately obvious and might be much more suitable for swapping out with plant-based alternatives. Powdered milk is used as an ingredient in many food products, from ice cream to infant formula, and might be easier to replace with plants.
Infant formulas are most commonly made from cows’ milk proteins that are spray-dried to create a powder. This powder is then reconstituted with water when the milk is required. Spray-drying means the milk powder can be stored for a longer period of time, it makes the milk temperature-stable and anti-microbial, and means you are transporting the milk without unnecessary water weight.
Could plant proteins replace cows’ milk proteins in infant formula? The importance of having the right balance of macronutrients (like protein and fat) and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) is clear for a product like infant formula. One difficulty for biochemists searching for plant-based alternatives is to reproduce the physical and nutritional properties of the powder.
“The challenge is that cows’ milk is very consistent – it all comes from the same animal,” says Cordelia Selomulya, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “Whereas with plant-based proteins, there are any number of plants we could use.” Even within pea or faba bean cultivars, for example, there is a great variety of different protein profiles.
“We’re in the process of working out which work best, which are most soluble, which maintain their nutritional profile [after being spray-dried], and so on,” says Selomulya.
But, getting the right blend of proteins is challenging. Plant proteins tend to be larger and form thicker layers between oil and water, which means they are generally poorer emulsifiers than animal proteins.
So perfect recreations of some whole meat products might still be some way off. However, there is reason to think we might soon be able to swap out animal-based ingredients for the right kinds of plant alternatives in many foods. It might be some time before we see a realistic plant-based steak in the supermarket, but should that be the goal?
“We should focus less on turning plant-based proteins into meat and focus more on what they do well,” says Rana Mustafa, a food scientist at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Mustafa studies plant-based proteins in traditional Syrian cuisine, and cites kibbeh as a good example of a food that works equally well with or without meat. Kibbeh are balls of fried wheat and spices that can be filled with meat, chickpeas, lentils – pretty much anything. She envisions a future in which we eat less meat, and more plants that are cooked to bring out the best of their qualities.
“It’s not just a fad, it won’t go away,” agrees Lamas Bezerra. “We’re going to see more and more products with different varieties – pork, chicken, seafood, beef, whole cuts. The whole thing is here to stay.”
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