An honest review of a McPlant burger
As we near the end of ‘Veganuary’, I was compelled to try McDonald’s newest offering, the McPlant burger. I prefer cooking at home, so started the experiment by making my own version of the burger, with the ingredients in the photo below:
I like making veggie burgers as a quick and easy dinner option. We grow a lot of our own veg, but as it’s winter, the homegrown element of the ingredients was hydroponic lettuce (I am so proud!) and pickled runner beans from last year. We used floury baps, fresh morning rolls from the local greengrocer.
Needless to say, our homemade burger was delicious. I found the Beyond Burger a bit of a strange texture, but other half assured me it was much like a meat burger, even the colour. Each burger was around 100 g and was made of a combination of pea, mung bean and rice protein, oils, starch and ‘natural-sounding’ flavours and colours. It had an impressive 19 grams of protein.
At the end of the week we were on the road to visit family, so stopped by a drive thru’ McDonalds. We had to work out how the system worked, and ordered our McPlant meals to eat in the car. Not something we do very often (like, ever), so it was a novelty trying to juggle fries, a falling-apart burger and medium shake (hello brain freeze). Hence no photo of the fast food, too fast to photograph.
McPlant burgers feature the Beyond Burger pattie as the centrepiece, and McDonald’s was certainly greasier than our homemade version. I can’t even remember eating the junk food, it just somehow got ingested with not much chewing required. The soggy shreds of iceberg lettuce no way compared to our home-grown hydroponic leaves. And there were no gherkins!
Whilst we were impressed with the cheap cost (around £5.50 per meal), we were underwhelmed by flavour and texture. The fries weren’t as good as I remembered from my teenage years (possibly the last time I had a Macca’s). But the problems started after we finished eating. After an hour I felt incredibly hungry, even though I had consumed around 1200 calories very quickly. High in the Glycaemic Index, a lot of junk food can give you a ‘hit’ when you eat it, to be followed by a definite sugar-crash. I was also inordinately thirsty. From inputting the meal into www.myfitnesspal.com I learned not only had I eaten over a thousand calories without realising, but over my daily recommended amount of salt, and nearly all of my fat. And then the next day I got pimples. Certainly not something that has happened since being a teen.
So would I recommend it as a healthy fast-food alternative?
Hell no.
Would I buy Beyond Burger patties from the supermarket to make it at home?
Perhaps every now and again. To me, they’re a bit of a science experiment, as Beyond Meat ‘grow’ the meat-alternative in factories. Call me old-fashioned, but I like food I can trust.
