Juicy Marbles’ filet mignon is good plant-based meat but not great steak - The Verge
Juicy Marbles claims it has made the first plant-based filet mignon. We had a vegetarian and meat eater try it out to see how it stacked up as a plant-based food and as an imitation.
It’s hard to stand out in the world of plant-based meats, but Juicy Marbles is trying to do so by attempting to replicate not just a steak but also one of the higher-end cuts: the filet mignon. When the company reached out to The Verge asking if we wanted to try its steaks, its promises of a tender filet that’s marbled and cooks like a real steak caught my attention, as someone who swore off eating meat for two years (but who still gets a little jealous of the delicious-looking things my wife eats). The price also caught my attention — $40 for a four-pack of four-ounce steaks. For the mathematicians at home, that’s $40 a pound.
Having eaten plenty of plant-based meats, though, I know that marketing materials can be very deceiving and that being expensive doesn’t automatically equate to tasting good. Keeping my hopes in check, I asked them to send me and my co-worker Alex Cranz, a person so committed to beef I think Hank Hill might have been modeled after her, some steaks. The plan was to get both a vegetarian and carnivorous perspective.
Soon enough, the steaks had arrived, swaddled in dry ice. While I was preparing to cook them, I noticed that the raw steak smelled very similar to raw Beyond Burger. That concerned me a little. While I do thoroughly enjoy a good plant-based hamburger, they often have a weird, indescribable taste that starts to seep in if the patty is too thick. (For example, I enjoy the Burger King Impossible Burger but not Red Robin’s, which is significantly heftier.) At the time, I didn’t know that it wouldn’t really end up tasting anything like a hamburger patty, so with some extra trepidation, I set about cooking it.
It’s been a second since I’ve cooked a “real” steak, and my go-to method was always… a little unconventional. For this test, I wanted to try the Juicy Marbles steak in its purest form, so I limited my seasoning to just salt and pepper and cooked it following Gordon Ramsay’s guide for literal children. Basically, I seared it on both sides, basted it in butter, and then rolled it in the pan to cook the edges. The filet definitely browned and crisped up, but I can’t say that it looked shockingly steak-like; to be honest, it kind of reminded me of an extra thick (and a little burnt) McDonald’s hash brown.
I could tell that the texture of the Juicy Marbles filet wasn’t going to be particularly convincing the second I cut into it, and my knife basically slid right through it. Looking at the inside, it was easy to see why. Juicy Marbles’ fake meat fibers are way bigger than in an actual steak. In fact, they’re almost identical to what you’d find in a slow-cooked pot roast.
Rating: 5