Quorn and other meat substitutes… February 17, 2018
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
Kind of a grudging article here. I’m not a vegetarian but would eat red meat rarely, white meat a bit more frequently and mainly subsist on fish as well as vegetarian meals. So I’d eat quorn once a week at least. Never had any problem with it, like the chunks, sausages are okay, not sure about the efforts to do more meat-like stuff, their bacon is mighty odd to eat, almost too close to meat in a weird way. Granted Quorn is highly processed, and evidence gathers apace that such processed foods are problematic in regard to health risks.
On the other hand looking at that last piece it seems to me a key takeaway is the following:
Ultra-processed foods include packaged baked goods and snacks, fizzy drinks, sugary cereals, “ready meals” and reconstituted meat products – often containing high levels of sugar, fat, and salt – but lacking in vitamins and fibre.
I’m always astounded looking through ready-meals in the supermarket at just how high those levels of sugar sats and salt are. And I suspect those are very much part and parcel of the problem in regard to those risks. As always balance seems to be key. Avoid overly processed foods with high fat/saturated fat/sugar and salt levels. Eat them rarely. Use fresh produce where possible with every meal and so on.
Still, for my money the best sausages bar none are the Linda McCartney ones. Just about perfect as meat substitutes.
What do people think of them? And what alternatives do people use to meat?
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
The need here is not just for a tax on sugar and salt, but health warning labels as in Chile.
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Not hugely fond of them, far too dry and with not enough flavour, although the variant they use for the sausage rolls is much nicer.
TVP (Soya mince) is good as a replacement for mince if you mix it with mushroom stock, nutritional yeast and herbs and spices. Quite cheap too at €2.29 for 375g bag (dried so it goes further than that frozen stuff) in Tesco.
As for Quron, tried the mince once, far too spongy, and with it using egg whites as a binder it’s not suitable for my cooking needs.
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That’s good advice Liberius re tvp – used to eat a lot of it but haven’t in ages
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Btw I also used to love Bean-feast. But haven’t seen it on sale in a long time – is it in Tesco or Dunnes still
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Had to Google that to know what it was (hardly a good sign), by the looks of it it isn’t available in Tesco in Ireland anymore but is available still in the UK.
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There was controversy in the late 90s with gm ingredients as part of its problem. I wonder if that had a knock on effect here? It’s years since I saw it.
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I stopped eating meat because (among other reasons) I basically thought it was disgusting (the texture, the taste, the idea…) so I’m not into the substitutes. Would much rather fill up on lentils, beans, nuts, etc.
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Funny you should say that – I was eating quorn ‘gammon steaks’ and found them too realize Eric, almost like tongue :(. That said I am fascinated by how ‘real’ it can get.
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Whoa, let’s not talk shit about eating tongues, they’re delicious!
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Never liked them, sorry. My Gran whose taste in most other things I would never fault loved them. Just can’t do it.
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Not quite offal, but an underrated cut of meat just the same.
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But fair play, what ever works for folks
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I used to like tripe with onions. My Gran was very much influenced by the war years in Britain so we would get tripe, pigs trotters, oxtail etc. Offal was big in our house. Then curiously enough she got into TVP, lentils, millet and so on. An odd mix.
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Speaking of the war years…
When I was a kid, my mum was in hospital so my da had to cook for us. One night he dished up a plate of mashed potato with some scrawny bits of corned beef in it:
Me: “Da, what is this? You know I hate mashed potato!”
Da: “That’s Belfast Goulash son”
Me: “Belfast WHAT?”
Da: “We lived on that during the war”
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🙂 How did it taste?
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Oh man, that’s brought back repressed memories of when my dad was unemployed for a longish while and my mother decided that we needed to eat meat at least three times a week for the good of our health, because in those days you’d fade away if you didn’t eat meat.
Which meant offal.
It’s as much texture as a taste thing that leads to childish revulsion and I can still recall the feel of tripe cooked in milk or ‘ox’ heart. We kids developed a technique of tossing chunks from the fork directly to the back of the mouth to minimise the taste buds and texture sensors it came in contact with.
Quorn I rather like – unfortunately I can’t find it in the big and relatively cheap bags of what tasted somewhere between pork and chicken any more – it’s all ‘value added’ and wrapped in a ton of plastic.
Fungus-based as well as vegetable proteins have to be part of a future sustainable diet.
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Not veggie, though herself doesn’t eat meat, and I have a fair sized garden so I’m on a plant heavy diet. My proper vegetarian friends agree with my one rule: never eat anything with the word “vegetarian” in its name.
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As an ex-vegetarian I’d say if you like eating meat, and I do, why eat ersatz meat like substitutes? Even as a vegetarian I didn’t like quorn, it was too meat like. I made a delicious roast leg of lamb last night, heaven. I get the whole moral aspect of vegetarianism but each to their own. Like any proper Stalinist I wouldn’t have much faith in individual choice as a mechanism to stop the slaughter of animals for food. But if it was abolished tomorrow I could happily return to the veggie diet.
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