I hate to admit it but this year it seems the Veganuary offerings are lacking. I haven’t actually seen many new options being advertised (at least not near where I live) and the few offers I have seen have been shockingly bad. Shout out in particular to Mcdonald’s, who think that they can add a second vegan burger patty to their burger and claim that is a ‘new option’. GET IT TOGETHER!
That being said, there are still some brilliant vegan options out there. One of my favourite places to go for dinner is Honest Burgers. Now they are not by default a vegan restaurant as they do offer meat burgers, but their vegan burger is so good that I would happily eat nothing else for the rest of my life. I am not even being dramatic when I say that their rosemary chips are life changing. So when I saw that they were offering a new vegan burger for Veganuary I had to try it.
Honest Burgers use the Beyond Meat burger patties and these patties are undeniably the best meat alternative out there. You would not be able to tell the difference. The texture is the same as meat, the ‘meaty juices’ are there and the taste is exactly how meat tastes. Now for me, personally, I like my meat alternatives to not be the perfect match for meat. I like knowing without a doubt that my food has absolutely no meat in it and these burgers do make me question it sometimes. So while I enjoy their burgers every now and again, I cannot eat the Beyond Meat products at home because i truly have my doubts with it sometimes. My partner, however, who was a big fan of burgers before he went veggie/vegan, adores these burgers. He states that the reason he loves these so much is because they taste identical to meat but don’t make him feel bloated or swollen afterwards the way meat burgers used to. So approach this how you will.
With the burger patty and the bun, it also includes Fable pulled shiitake mushrooms, teriyaki sauce, Applewood Vegan cheese, grilled peppers, spring onions, umami mayo and lettuce. Now all of those very watery vegetables plus the sauces made this burger to be VERY messy indeed. Be ready with napkins because the sauce was all over my hands by the second bite. Now I am not a big fan of eating in front of people, so having a very messy burger doesn’t really help. But if you have a lot of napkins nearby (or possibly even scrape off some of the sauce?) you should get through this without too much carnage.
Now I didn’t get much teriyaki taste with it. The mushrooms added a nice extra texture and the peppers were also a good addition to the burger. The actual burger tasted very smoky, which I am assuming is due to the umami sauce. Perhaps the teriyaki works to add some sweetness to dilute the smoke of the umami, but I didn’t get any sweetness at all. It was definitely a very savoury burger, even when you add in the peppers and the teriyaki. But that is not a negative, as the burger was still absolutely delicious. It really did make me feel like I was at a family BBQ and in this horrible January weather (here in the UK it has rained all day for about 17 days straight) the reminder of warmer summer months is very much welcome.
Taylor Talks Vegan 