A Harvested Burger

By Lee Yu Kit, Nov 2, 2021, 

Updated, Nov 9, 2021

With the surge in interest in realistic plant-based meat alternatives, food giant Nestle has launched its own line under the Harvest Gourmet brand. Like the poster boys of the alternative meat movement, Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, Harvest Gourmet (HG) is all plant-based, with a range of products launched in Malaysia earlier this year. 

The products are made-in-Malaysia in a Nestle plant (See here ) and are available in local supermarkets. If you experienced sticker shock shopping for plant-based meats, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how reasonably priced Nestle’s offerings are.

Having sampled both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat burgers when they became available in Singapore (see here for a comparison of the two) , I was intrigued by what Nestle had to offer. Both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are startups and minnows in the food industry compared to global food giant Nestle, but as the song lyric goes, times, they are a-changing, and Nestle apparently realizes this, in the midst of a global climate crisis and the growing awareness of the environmental impact of meat.

For RM17.30, I bought a packet of 3 Harvest Gourmet Sensational Burgers at a local supermarket. The package lists soy protein as the main ingredient (19%). Although the picture on the package features goodies such as pomegranate, beetroot, paprika, carrots and blackcurrants, these are only present as fruit and vegetable concentrates (0.9%) and are colouring material which gives the burger its meaty colour.

Preparation was easy, grill, fry or cook in an oven at 200 degrees straight from the freezer.  These were handsome looking meat-like patties, thick regular round discs with a pleasant pinkish colour, like fine-textured semi-cooked meat. I fried them in a pan, and they contained enough oil (rapeseed, coconut) to cook without adding any additional oil. 

They began to sizzle and brown rather convincingly, displaying nice sear marks and holding together nicely. They weren’t too oily, (like some real meat burgers) with a light fragrance quite unlike any vegetable. 

I pan-fried a seeded bun, placed tomato and onion slices as a bed, and flipped the cooked burger patties onto them. The final cooked product looked enticing, and to all appearances was a nicely-seared meat patty.

The taste test: the texture was remarkably like finely-ground meat, with the characteristic rough graininess, so uncanny as to be indistinguishable from a well-ground lean-meat burger. (None of the bits of gristle and chewy bits you sometimes find in real meat burgers, which always gives me pause).  Taste wise, it was quite mild and neutral, not aggressively beefy but meatier and stronger-flavoured than bland chicken. On a sliding scale, I would give it a 7 or 8 between chicken (1) and beef (10) for meaty flavour.

Give this to someone without telling them what it was, and they would be incredulous that it didn’t contain real meat. With its easy meaty flavour, it’s also unlikely to offend those who find beef too strong for their taste, but will those hardcore beef eaters who like that full-flavoured bloodiness of real, juice-oozing meat be impressed?  Nestle seem to have gone for a middle ground and the overall package of flavour, appearance, proximity to real meat and pricing make it very appealing.

As a quick fuss-free burger meal with some bite, it scores highly.

 

On the nutritional front, HG’s burger has a similar profile to the other plant-based burgers, Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger. Highlights, per portion (113g for all)  calories, Impossible 240kcal, Beyond 230 kcal, HG 218 kcal. Protein content for Impossible is 19g vs Beyond’s 20g and HG’s 15.8g, while the sodium content is 390mg, 390mg and 359mg for Impossible, Beyond and HG respectively, with data from the individual companies’ websites respectively.  

HG derives its protein from soybeans, Impossible from soybeans and potato, while Beyond uses mainly pea protein.

It’s not possible to compare these directly to say, a McDonald’s Big Mac, as McDonald’s lists values for the whole hamburger, including fillings, sauce and bun, but as a matter of interest, a whole Big Mac weighs in at 491 kcal, 26g of protein and 2.7g or 2700 mg of salt overall. McDonald’s data is from its Malaysian website here .

It’s remarkable how rapidly food technology has progressed, to developing plant-based products that not only look like, but have the texture and taste, of real meat. These are a far cry from the Chinese vegetarian mock meat products that have been a mainstay of Chinese vegetarian food for centuries, and which often resemble real meat until you take a bite.

Once a novelty, plant-based meats are now available in supermarkets, with market data indicating strong growth in plant-based meats, which are still, overall, a fraction of a growing global demand for meat.  In Malaysia, Harvest Gourmet moves plant-based meats closer to the mainstream with its authentic-tasting, Malaysian made product.

Harvest Gourmet’s website can be found here

Update: Nov 9, 2021.  MyBurgerLab (MBL) will substitute its meat patty (beef or chicken) with a HG Burger at the same price across its burger range, with a couple of exceptions. I tried the Ohana burger sans cheese, the toppings, charcoal bun and sauces made it a very appetising burger, and a far cry from my own plain-jane effort. There's more to a good burger than the meat patty inside, but to its credit, the HG Burger patty gave no dissenting note to the overall excellence of the burger. It was, to all intents and purposes, a great meat burger.