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.
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.