OK, look. I know this review of Beyond Meat’s Sausage patty isn’t exactly hot. The product debuted in at retail back in March (which is approximately 17 years ago in pandemic time). But! In my defense, it wasn’t available at my local grocer until recently.
Ironically, now that it is available at my local grocer, I skipped the store altogether and ordered it directly from Beyond Meat, which launched its own e-commerce site last week.
I took a bit of a chance ordering a product I hadn’t yet tried direct because you can only order in bulk from Beyond. So a few clicks and shipping days later, 44 frozen plant-based breakfast patties arrived at my door (complete with a Beyond-branded facemask) earlier this week.
A couple years back, when touring the Beyond HQ and R&D facility, I had actually tasted an early version of the sausage patty. I raved about it at the time and hoped that the final production version would live up to that fond memory.
It most certainly does.
The Beyond patties are smaller than what you’d find in a restaurant or QSR breakfast sandwich but in line with other frozen sausage patties available at the grocery store.
Beyond recommends cooking them on the stove or oven — not the microwave. I cooked mine in the June Oven, which doesn’t have an automated cook program for the Beyond patties yet (it has presets for the Beyond Burgers and Brats). While the patties came out nice and piping hot, next time I’ll use the stove or griddle to get a little more of a crust on the outside.
I threw some cheddar on the cooked patty and slid the whole thing onto an english muffin. Because the patty is on the small side, the muffin sort of engulfs and overwhelms the sausage. But that’s just a nit-pick. The important thing is the taste, and Beyond nails it.
The Beyond sausage patty has a rich, peppery, greasy (in the best way) taste, with the right texture and mouthfeel. I don’t think it would fool a meat eater, but I’m not sure it needs to. In addition to the straight patty, I can easily see grinding these up and using them to spice up other plant-based meat dishes.
While I may have been late to Beyond Sausage, I’m glad it’s finally in my freezer. The pandemic has highlighted and reinforced the ethical and labor issues around animal-based meat production, which makes me feel more at ease eating plant-based meats. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that they are also delicious.
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