Today, Impossible Foods announced the debut of their plant-based sausage links, the sixth retail product from the alt protein pioneer in the last eight months.
The new products come in three different varieties – Spicy, Italian, and Bratwurst – and the company claims they have the same snap and savory flavor as conventional pork sausage.
The Spoon got a hold of some samples in advance of today’s news, so I thought I’d try them out. I was excited because I like sausage, and my favorite Impossible product – by a long shot – is the company’s ground sausage product which came out last year.
I pulled the sausages out of the package, and this is what they looked like:
While the Impossible sausages look link-ish, they also struck me as looking a bit, well, squooshy. And, when I picked them up, they felt soft and didn’t have the same firmness I associate with traditional sausage. This, of course, has a lot to do with the casing (which I’ll talk more about a bit later).
You can see in the video below what an Impossible sausage link looks like grilling up in a pan. The instructions suggested I heat the link up at a medium heat. I put a couple of drops of olive oil in the pan to give it a little more sizzle while cooking.
After cooking the link for 10 minutes, rotating it every minute or two to give it that nice sausage crispiness, I plated it. It looked pretty close to what a conventional pork sausage link looks like on a plate, with slight exception of the casing, which looked a bit loose at the end of the link.
I cut up the sausage into smaller pieces and gave it a taste. I liked the flavor of the interior sausage and thought it tasted pretty darn close to what a conventional sausage filling tasted like. The mouthfeel was similar and, overall, it definitely didn’t give me uncanny valley “vibes”.
But where the sausage fell short is, you guessed it, the casing. The casing is what gives a sausage link its famous “snap” when eating, and, truth be told, the Impossible link just doesn’t have it.
Of course, I understand there are tradeoffs, and no doubt it’s really hard to mimic a conventional casing made of (yes, gross) animal intestines. But the reality is Impossible’s isn’t there yet.
Would I try it again? Yes. I think the Impossible sausage links taste good and I would happily replace conventional pork sausage with these in future meals. But, unfortunately, those craving that traditional sausage snap won’t find what they’re looking for with Impossible’s plant-based alternative.
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