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.
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
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
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
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 cocktail 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.
What are the highly processed ingredients?
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.
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.
What’s yallz favorite fake chicken nuggies?
I like impossible nuggs, and Gardein 7-Grain
I’m partial to the Impossible Spicy nuggets
The vegan dino nuggets
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
Bon Appetit’s crispy tofu nuggets recipe
The Simulate Nuggs are probably my favorite, mine come from Safeway.
I tried a few and i honestly can’t tell them apart.
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.
Probably has more to do with spices than the chicken vs non-chicken. There are some incredible vegan-meat stuff out there because the spice game is 10/10. And I’m down for it.
I eat meat but I go Qurorn nuggets when I buy frozen to eat less meat but also because they genuinely taste better than chicken goop.
I still think chicken tenders taste better and I have no real issue eating chicken goo but it comes down to three/four things. Price, taste, healthiness, less suffering.
There is ways to get people to eat less meat and it think it starts with some meals being vegan or having some meals that are 50% less meat and then 50% mushrooms/veggies.
Chicken smells awful to me, especially what they use for typical nuggets, plus I never really enjoyed those gross gristle bits.
Nice. It was bound to happen eventually.
Are they cheaper?
The panel of 1,150 American omnivores liked nuggets from Impossible Foods, MorningStar Farms, Quorn, Rebellyous Foods and Simulate the best
It wasn’t a single particular nugget, but an aggregate of vegan nuggets. And I can assure you, that Quorn and Morningstar are definitely cheaper than livestock chicken nuggets.
Really? They’re multiple times more here
Yeah around me they are at least double. Usually like 2.5-3x more expensive. It’s the only thing that stops me from getting them like constantly
Srsly? Wow. I’ve seen immposible go for around ten dollars, gardien for like 5, and then morning star and quorn for around 3. I don’t buy any of them because baking my own tofu ones is easy and I enooy cooking.
This is on the west coast US
In Australia they’re basically triple price. I can get 500g of Australian chicken nuggets for $3.50 or 280g of Quorn for $7
Share the tofu recipe? I’d probably beyond my skill as a cook, but I’m always interested to learn more.
It’s honestly not that tricky, just a little time intensive. My secret, not-so-secret trick for all tofu is to freeze it immediately, then dethaw day of with warm water/microwave on low/leaving on the counter all day/night. The freezing proces changes the texture in to something super tender!
Quorn
Their nuggets are over $7 per pound here in SE Michigan. That is expensive.
Aldi had some plant based nuggs for a bit that were by far the best nuggets I’ve had as an adult. Never seen them again though, sadly.
Same here. I don’t know what happened. When they did sell them, I would occasionally see them out of stock, so I would have thought they were selling well. I would personally buy like 6 boxes at a time sometimes. I haven’t found a good replacement.
I think some of these things are just repacked over runs of other products, so once the supply is out, that’s the end of them. It does get frustrating when you try something, and when you go back for more, they’re already gone.
I feel some of it is just because I can’t get any more though. I really stocked up on the Herring from German week, and now I’ve only at like 2 cans of it. 😅
Those nuggets had the absolute perfect texture, tasted great, and I found them more filling as well. Would love for them to have some type of seitan nugget sometime as well. I’m sure they could get a good one.
