Cheap chicken nuggets are trash anyways. If you’re buying cheap chicken nuggets, you may as well do yourself the favor of getting the ones made of tofu instead of chicken paste.
It’s the breading and the deep friedness that makes it good.
This is my entire take on most veg meat replacements. I won’t use substitutes in place of higher quality meat, but if I could I’d replace every single instance of low quality meat in my diet with some tofu/cauliflower/tempeh/whatever substitute.
It’s like, I get the nostalgia of shitty chicken nuggets, but 0% chance of biting into a piece of gristle? Sign me up
Quorn is way better than tofu or what I assume is some form of seitan you get with some of these. It really is way better flavor and texture than even decent quality chicken nuggets.
What are the highly processed ingredients?
Alternative headline -
Plant based version of the absolute worst quality meat product is the only one from five that is preferable to the meat version, but only because it’s deep fried and unhealthy
Come on guys
I had some plant based nuggets and they were horrible! They had all the flavour and texture of chewing a cardboard box.
So colour me skeptical.
I had Franzia and it was horrible! Bitter and it took on plastic flavors from the bag it was stored in.
Colour me skeptical of wine.
Like drinking from a tire
I’ve had probably 4 or 5 different brands. Two of them were really good, the others were as you described.
A lot of them are shit, no question. They’re made for vegans.
Do a taste test of a bunch of brands and find the right one for you.
Make them free for all. Solve hunger and reduce carbon emissions.
Our nuggies comrades.
Nuggets solving the climate crisis would be the perfect ending to the clown-era of humanity
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if they keep trying to “replace” meats, they’re competing in a game they can’t win
Except they literally won, lol.
It’s all about selling the idea that you can do away with meat if you’re a meat lover. For a lot of them, that’s not going to happen by just saying “hey eat vegan food!”
But if you say “yo, taste this burger - whadayathink? I know right?!! Can you believe it’s not made out of cow?!” Then maybe, maybe, the dude will say “you know what? For my next bbq Imma use impossi-burgers - damn tasty those thingies!”
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stop hurting animals
What if the animals were dicks? Would it be okay then?
I’m not a vegan, but I’ve eaten at a few vegan restaurants that were highly rated. The delicious vegan food that you’re talking about already exists, but most people will never go to a vegan restaurant over a non-vegan one.
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And if you can get a vegan meal at the Burger Barn or Grills R Us, which is just as good as corpse, then it’s a lot easier for vegans and vegan-curious carnists
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According to your logic that if there’s an -ist word then there must be a religion, it would seem that dentists follow the religion dentism. Chemists follow the religion chemism, and arsonists follow the religion arsonism.
On the other hand, perhaps a somethingist is just a person who does something. In which case, a carnist is anyone who does meat.
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“Normal” people are always complaining when there’s a word to describe them. Remember all that drama about cisgender being a slur? It’s literally just the most logical word for the purpose. When there’s a word to describe the normalised group, people inside that group go apeshit. It’s a fundamental human bias. I once lost an entire friend group because one of the people in it couldn’t stand that I used the word alloromantic.
If you don’t like the word carnist, suggest another word that’s equally clear and equally convenient.
I mean, I have been known to do meat. It’s just so sexy, all juicy and with the myoglobin dripping. Who wouldn’t do it?
The sexual politics of meat strikes again
This is true for people who already are vegans. My sister tries to use less meat, and when she wants to cook something where she used chicken before, she buts the “vegan chicken” and so on. I love trying new and maybe weird stuff, but people with 40 year old habits are not gonne buy cube shaped mystery things that are sometimes more expensive than the meaty counterpart.
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Facts, I’ve been saying this for a while. It seems to have worked for milk, people like oat milk despite it unabashedly not tasting like animal milk.
we have evolved to enjoy the flavours of meat. and cooked meat. making a delicious product means copying some of these elements. it seems that these nuggets play on that and expand on that.
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Umami is a solved problem though. Miso, soy sauce, shiitake mushrooms, kombu seaweed. All excellent vegan sources of umami.
The hardest part of making vegan meat substitutes is texture. How do you replicate the texture of steaks, ribs, brisket? These are very complex with muscle fibres, intramuscular fat, bones, connective tissues. Not easy!
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Yeah. All of the best-textured vegan foods that I’ve had are not imitation meat. Stuff like crunchy starch-based food, breads, waffle cones, chewy noodles, dumplings, pizza, shahi kofta, etc!
Those nuggets are barely chicken anyways. If they can make a healthier, tastier nugget then that’s a win for everyone.
I bet they are not healthier.
They are not - they have super high sodium levels.
Ah perfect. Nuggets and fries are but mere vessels to deliver salt to my taste buds. This is a positive development.
Some people need extra sodium for their health, so it’s healthy for us
Healthier, tastier and at the same price point, hopefully
Is that because normal chicken nuggets are so over processed now that they’re more easily defeated in taste tests?
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had “fake” chicken nuggets and they’re absolutely fine. I’d have them any time vs regular.
It’s probably more that fake chicken in general has been really good for a while now, you’d be hard pressed to know it’s not real chicken if you weren’t told beforehand. My local shop puts most meat-free stuff all in one corner together, but meat-free chicken nuggets get to go on display next to the real stuff in the freezer section.
Red meat is the difficult stuff, most fakes aren’t great and it’s almost always easy to tell it’s not real meat. When I feel like sausages I usually go for Richmond meat-free ones, I do like them but it’s very obvious it’s not pork. They have recently released removedtail sausages I love, though!
Has fake chicken gotten significantly better in recent years? A couple years ago I dated a vegetarian and while fake chicken was perfectly fine and I liked it, it was still a very different taste to chicken.
It’s interesting that it’s the taste that threw you off, usually texture is the bigger one for me. Chicken flavour primarily comes from the fat rather than the meat so I always assumed that was the easy part to replicate. We’ve had wildly popular meat-free chicken flavoured products for decades and that was just to make a cheaper product before meat-free was popular, it could just be that I’m too used to artificial chicken flavours. It’s relatively easy to find meat-free chicken (or beef) stock these days too.
I mean nuggets, the ones that contain mostly “meat paste” and aren’t high quality chicken breast strips, those don’t taste really good at all, so shouldn’t be hard to beat them, they are also not something you need to beat since they are just trying to use the whole chicken the less desirable parts so it doesn’t go to waste.
I’d recommend this excellent video about jamie olivers war on nuggets
While I personally don’t do well on a full vegan diet, the vegan food I like is it’s own thing, not some terrible imitation of meat.
Indian vegan dishes are amazing for example.
Exactly. You can either use high quality natural ingredients or you can try to mimic them. With the exception of some dishes where say imitation ground beef works well, you’re always better off highlighting plants and fungus in their natural form rather than trying to make them taste and look like something else.
Yeah, I think it’s a pretty strong argument that plant-based and lab-grown meat companies are making a mistake trying to beat the cheapest, lowest grade meat products such as chicken nuggets. You’ve got a hell of an uphill battle to engineer these things to be both cheaper and tastier than the meat ones.
The issue is that wealthy people (those most likely to be vegan) don’t buy these crappy products in the first place.
If instead they tried to beat high end products such as steaks or rare fish they’d have a much bigger margin for profit, after taking into account all the expensive R&D.
Nice. It was bound to happen eventually.
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Love me some fake chicken nuggies.
Been doing blind taste test every year and as real chicken nuggie companies cheap out, you can really taste the sadness. Fake chicken nuggets just taste more hefty.
What’s yallz favorite fake chicken nuggies?
Bon Appetit’s crispy tofu nuggets recipe
I like impossible nuggs, and Gardein 7-Grain
I’ve tried a bunch, some disappointing but my favorite is Quorn
Quorn is good but (I was surprised to find) not vegan - they still have eggs. Not the worst concession, but FYI for anyone looking through the comments for plant based options.
Ah you’re right my bad! I’m vegetarian so I sometimes forget those details
I tried a few and i honestly can’t tell them apart.
The vegan dino nuggets
The Simulate Nuggs are probably my favorite, mine come from Safeway.
I’m partial to the Impossible Spicy nuggets
There’s cauliflower “chicken” nuggets my girlfriend and I get often. They’re WAY better than chicken.
They do cauliflower Buffalo wings near my place. They’re fucking delicious and just taught me the chicken is merely a substrate for the hot sauce and dip to live on. Plus no bones
Yeah that’s something I learned too. While meats can and do have their own distinct flavor, seasoning does most of the heavy lifting.
I haven’t stopped eating meat entirely but just practicing seasoning use has opened my pantry up to do many more foods.
We were trying to figure out what to do with leftover dry lentils after using them for soup, so I looked up online and found people using them as mince replacement.
So we ended up whipping up some lentil bolognese. Taste & texture were the furthest thing away from beef. But damn it was tasty in its own right.
That sounds good. With meat-alternative products I find they are incredibly polarized. Like they are either incredibly amazing, or they are nearly inedible
When i make enough money to only buy the things i use from sources i approve of we can revisit this. I’m not even the worst off as I’ve of the poors but until the majority of people can choose what they want this you might as well call it Supreme Nugs and charge accordingly
This is basically the Nirvana fallacy. While maybe you need to make some compromises (e.g few of us can afford clothing that likely doesn’t involve child labour) you can make real, positive change. In clothing for example you can get second hand stuff, or just choose to have fewer items. Regardless of the difficulties with clothing nobody would say "I can’t afford an ethical parker to survive winter, therefore I will punch a stranger in the face as you can’t be perfect.
you can make real change, veganism is about what is practicable. Nobody expects you to die because the world is set up in fucked up ways and your BP meds were tested on animals or whatever but you can avoid animal products without perfect replacements. You don’t need to replace chicken nuggets with plant nuggets, you can replace them with daal nutritionally…
There is no ethical consumption while living a capitalist way of life.
