How Much Does a Burge Rkign Chicken Nugget Way

To be honest, I was expecting to be grossed out by the Impossible nugget. I'm a veggie burger agnostic who prefers the imperfect, rugged texture of a handmade bean patty over a beef-adjacent facsimile, and I was expecting the plant-based chicken nugget to possess the same uncanny, meat-but-not-meat properties as the vegan burger that bleeds. I find the bleeding rather spooky, like the statues of the Virgin Mary that bleed from their eyes.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached the assignment to try the nuggets ($12.99), which were recently launched as a special at the Gott's Roadside restaurants in the Bay Area.

Served fried, with a stiff breadcrumb coating and tiny cups of ranch, honey mustard and barbecue sauce, the nuggets looked, well, like anything else you might find in a frybasket. A good fried breading— generously applied, craggy and cooked to a fine bronze — can cover a multitude of sins. Each flat nugget is about 1¼ inches in size, shaped with an eye toward wabisabi-like imperfection. You want a little bit of differentiation, lest the uniformity lend the objects an air of alienness.

They sort of taste like chicken. There's no aftertaste, and the texture is akin to a dish where a protein has been blended into a smooth industrial paste and cooked to order. That might not sound super appealing, but it's nearly indistinguishable from what food manufacturers do to make the nuggets that animals die for already.

Close-up of a plant-based Impossible Foods nugget.

Soleil Ho / The Chronicle

The effect is acheived with a base of soy protein, which is then bound with methylcellulose (commonly found in ice cream) and modified food starch, and moistened with sunflower oil. The result mimics the bouncy, gentle chew of a chicken patty. Turmeric and paprika add some life to its appearance, while dried alliums and yeast, a vegan chef's best friends, give it some meaty, umami character.

At Gott's Roadside at San Francisco's Ferry Terminal building, I heard multiple tables talking excitedly about nuggets, which is not the kind of conversation that I usually overhear in this area, where the city's biggest farmers' market is held. "Have you tried The Nuggets?" people asked each other, the capitalized words somehow legible in speech. Outside of this city, the product has also launched at big-box grocery stores and at trendy spots like Fuku in New York, N.Y. and the just-opened State Street Market in Los Altos. It's likely only a matter of time until, like the company's beef-ish burgers, the nuggets begin to infiltrate the menus at fast-food restaurants as well.

An Impossible Foods plant-based nugget, dipped in barbecue sauce at Gott's Roadside in S.F.

Soleil Ho / The Chronicle

For the sake of contrast, I visited a McDonald's drive-thru in Emeryville to try the gold standard of fast-food chicken nuggets, the 10-piece McNuggets ($5.75). Rather than the crumb-like exterior of the Impossible nuggets, the McDonald's version has a delicate floured coating. Citric acid and lemon juice preserve the meat and give the flavor a faint lift. The meat itself is thick and tacky, the fibers vaguely discernable if you try to pull it apart. The taste, though, was almost indiscernable from the Impossible nugget — blander, at that.

I'll level with you: I haven't eaten a McNugget in about 20 years, though at a certain point, I ate a lot. Served from the '80s onward, the McNugget was a hit for the international fast-food chain, which manufactures the product and ships them to franchises in frozen bags. Branded as a kid-friendly food, nuggets became an integral part of the Millennial American child's diet. They had a built-in "fun" bonus aspect that was readily seized upon by McDonald's and billion-dollar grocery aisle brands like Conagra: their amenability to being shaped like stars, bells and, in an evolutionarily poetic touch, dinosaurs.

Close-up of a McDonald's McNugget.

Soleil Ho / The Chronicle

My time with nuggets stopped in 2001, when "Fast Food Nation" came out. The book, by investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, revealed the histories and inner workings of America's fast-food giants much in the same way Upton Sinclair's Socialist novel "The Jungle" blew open the meatpacking industry in 1906. In grim detail, Schlosser outlined the public health disaster that is the meatpacking industry, fast-food's economic impact on the working class, and the sophisticated methods through which processed foods like McNuggets and burgers are marketed to children.

While Schlosser doesn't press for a meat-free diet nor a Socialist reimagining of society, his work enlightened a generation brought up by Ronald McDonald. At the very least, you couldn't claim ignorance about fast food anymore. A child myself at the time, I picked it up from a relative's bookshelf, read it, and never ate another nugget, until this review. I could only eat one before intrusive, brutal thoughts of frantic meatpacking workers deboning chickens at breakneck speed flooded my mind.

Yet, in our post-"Fast Food Nation" world, nuggets have only continued to proliferate. McDonald's reported a 40% increase in sales this year after launching a collaboration with Korean boy band BTS, which included a 10-piece package of McNuggets and sweet chile and Cajun-inspired sauces. In grocery stores, nuggets breaded with whole wheat flour and made of free range chicken meat are a common sight. On social video platform TikTok, videos with the hashtag #chickennuggets have accumulated over a billion views. (Yes, there are nugget influencers now.) The nugget may be with us forever.

Impossible Foods is not the first company to think of reimagining the nugget. Gardein and MorningStar Farms, two companies whose frozen vegan foods are found at many grocery stores, have been making nuggets from plant protein for years.

But the new class of nuggets is meant for imperceptible mimicry, with high-tech alterations developed through blind taste tests. Manhattan-based Simulate, a venture capital-funded company, sells its futuristic nuggets and patties at natural foods retailers like Berkeley Bowl. Competition is fierce, with conglomerates like Tyson in the game as well.

If meatpacking and slaughterhouse practices are part of the trouble with processed chicken, it's logical to also wonder what it's like to work in the plant-based meat industry.

It's not all sunshine and vegan rainbows: North Carolina plant-based meat company No Evil Foods recently thwarted a unionization drive through what workers described to news site the Appeal as a hostile union-busting campaign. Several pro-union employees who openly called for pandemic hazard pay and better safety measures were fired in the lead-up to the vote. If Tyson, which increased slaughterhouse line speeds at its plants last year, is manufacturing plant-based nuggets, does that necessarily mean that the absence of chickens will make the company's factories safer for workers?

For its part, Impossible Foods, which hopes to replace all animal agriculture by 2035, is aiming to conflate vegan meat with better labor practices. In an interview with Forbes last year, CEO Patrick Brown promised that his company would create "cleaner, safer, higher-paying jobs" for meat industry workers in a post-meat world. Impossible, though, is now in chains like Burger King with its beef imitation, and can't control conditions there; the problem of a broken fast-food system remains.

But if we're just talking about the "meat" in the nuggets themselves, their mystique may end up being their strength. The Impossible nugget works because, to be frank, no claim of authenticity can truly apply when we're talking about a dish we don't even eat for its inherent chicken-ness. If you're eating a fast-food nugget, you've already surrendered a great deal of control over the ratio of actual muscle to fat and nerve tissue you'd prefer in your meal. Might as well bypass that can of worms entirely and eat something that tastes just about the same as the original, especially if you're just going to dunk it in barbecue sauce anyway.

Soleil Ho is The San Francisco Chronicle's restaurant critic. Email: soleil@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hooleil

How Much Does a Burge Rkign Chicken Nugget Way

Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/restaurants/article/impossible-nuggets-taste-test-review-chicken-16480634.php

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