Diner’s Diary | Plant-based Impossible Burger 2.0 now in Hong Kong. We give it a taste
- The new version is said to be juicier and more beef-tasting than the original, and now uses soybeans instead of wheat to allay gluten concerns
- Since the Impossible Burger’s debut in Hong Kong last year, it has been put on the menus of 150 restaurants around the city
In April last year, Impossible Foods made its Asia debut in Hong Kong with CEO and founder Dr Pat Brown presenting its plant-based Impossible Burger patty, cooked in various ways by chefs Uwe Opocensky of burger chain Beef & Liberty and May Chow of Little Bao.
Since then the product has been put on the menus of 150 restaurants around Hong Kong and some 180,000 have been sold, mostly as vegan or vegetarian burgers.
Now, less than a year later, Impossible Foods is back with version 2.0 of the plant-based patty. Perhaps ironically, it was presented at a restaurant called Wagyu on Wyndham Street in the city’s Central business district on Wednesday.
Impossible Foods claims the new version is juicier and tastes more like beef than the first version. It has also switched to using soybeans; the previous one was made of wheat and some consumers had concerns about gluten. It still contains heme, an iron-rich molecule that is also found in meat. It also contains 30 per cent less sodium and 40 per cent less saturated fat than the first version.
At Wagyu, the Impossible Burger 2.0 was fried and placed in a toasted sesame bun which we could customise with butter lettuce, slices of tomato and beets, guacamole, and mayonnaise mixed with sriracha sauce.
On first bite, the medium-rare patty had the texture of a beef patty, and held together much better than the first version. However, tastewise it seemed bland and needed more sauce to give it flavour.