This Might Be One Of The Best Beef Burgers We’ve Had — Except It’s Meat-Free

This meat replacement minced patty, funded by big-name investors like Singapore’s Temasek Holdings and reportedly, Bill Gates too, trumps the one by its most famous rival, Beyond Meat (we think the latter is a bit too ‘gristly’ in texture and has a faintly beany taste).

Photo: Bill Gates, Twitter

While most restaurants have chosen to treat the patties as regular minced beef and merely season them as they would a burger, trust Omakase boss Cheng Hsin Yao, 33, to take it a step further. This is, after all, the man who created an extensive Excel sheet detailing the various beef blends that would eventually lead to his popular Omakase burgers that are styled after Shake Shack’s, yet boast juicier beef patties.

Rather than use Impossible’s burger patties straight up, Hsin Yao has brought his deep interest and knowledge about creating the perfect burger and made a patty that is, to us, the best of the Impossible Burger options available here.

The Impossible Burger is made from ingredients like soy protein, coconut oil, sunflower oil, and “heme” or legume hemoglobin. The latter contains iron, which gives the burgers that distinctive flavour of meat. We’ve had is straight up without anything added to it, and it tasted like lean beef without the mineral edge of blood.

To zhng Omakase’s Impossible Burger, Hsin Yao mixes the Impossible patty with a blend of “secret” plant-based ingredients like tomatoes and mushrooms to give it a more succulent, luscious texture. Additionally, these ingredients really up the umami quotient.

“Umami comes from glutamate and (the amino acid) guanylate. The usual suspects that carry these elements within plants are mushrooms, seaweed, konbu (sea kelp) and tomatoes,” the former banker explained. “The tricky part when it came to making our Impossible burgers was processing forms of these ingredients so that they would do well as part of a patty. For example, miso is super high in umami, but having it as a paste in the patty isn’t pleasant, so you might have to dehydrate it and turn it into a powder first, for example.”

The patties are “smashed” against the grill, just like Omakase does its popular beef patties, giving them a flatter surface and more area for caramelisation. The result: really tasty, juicy, plant-based faux beef patties that come as close it gets to real beef burgers.

In our humble opinion, the only shortfall of the Impossible “meat” is the lack of the taste of blood. It is the single thing meat lovers will miss when they taste the patty, which would otherwise pass off as beef. While the Omakase X Impossible Burger is no exception, it does make up for it with a really lovely char that holds in all the 'meaty' juiciness and umami depth of its plant-based ingredients. Our cooked-to-medium patty even has the succulent texture of beef. If anything, someone who didn’t know they were eating a plant-based patty might just think that the chef used a leaner, humbler mix of minced beef.

It helps that this has all the best elements you'd want in any burger — meat or otherwise. The squishy Martin’s Rolls potato buns (the top choice hamburger roll in the United States; Martin’s also makes the burger buns for Shake Shack in the US) hold all the juices that run down the burger as you chomp into them, and the melty American cheese has a rich, tasty depth. Meanwhile, the 13-ingredient secret Omakase sauce (that’s kinda like Shake Shack’s thousand Island-ish sauce) gives it all a bright, piquant lift. As we eat this burger, its juices running deliciously down into its wrapper, and we can’t help but think if we hadn’t been told that this were a vegetarian patty, we'd have been none the wiser.

Note that the regular beef cheeseburger basic set is $18.90 before GST at Omakase. We’re told the Impossible product is more expensive than real meat because of smaller economies of scale and its expensive manufacturing process.

Deliciously rich with a creamy truffle fondue sauce made from cream cheese, truffle oil and a mix of other “secret” cheeses. While this burger is as juicy as its non-truffle counterpart and heady with the scent of the prized fungi, we think that the original non-truffle stuff is more enjoyable. That’s probably because the lack of a tangy tomato element in the sauce here renders the patty less tasty. Still a darn good truffle burger, though.

Perhaps because the mince is cooked in a robust gravy, you simply cannot tell that this con-carne-style chilli is meat-free. In fact, we like that the texture of the stewed “meat” is more tender and less sinewy than beef can be, making for easier eating with the crisp fries. The sauce is rich with the flavour of Mexican chilli powder, tomatoes and beans. It’s so good that Omakase now only makes this meatless version of its chilli cheese fries.

In our opinion, Impossible — especially Omakase’s pimped up version — offers the best meat substitute in town. So if you’re avoiding beef and craving a burger, this will more than hit the spot. It’s actually better than some actual beef burgers out there (just not Omakase’s — we admit we’d still choose its shiok beef cheeseburger over the meat-free stuff if we were going to indulge in a sinful meal).

Omakase Burger is at Picnic, #03-15-49 Wisma Atria, 435 Orchard Rd. S238877. Open daily 11am-10pm. Last orders 9.30pm. www.omakaseburger.com

Photos: Omakase Burger