For those who enjoy meat but want to cut back on it for many reasons, the arrival on the market of manufactured meat-mimicking substances is an amazing moment. Two brands, Impossible and Beyond, seem to me to be the front-runners, though I’d be interested to hear about others. Beyond is based on pea protein, Impossible on soy. See the comments for complete ingredient lists for these two products. [Note: this is not about lab-grown meat, which is not yet, to my knowledge, approved in the US for human consumption.]
I decided to try these “unmeats,” side by side, in a very simple chili from my childhood, a half-batch with Impossible substituting for the hamburger, and another with Beyond, to compare the tastes of the two. It also turned out that the unmeats had some different cooking properties. I later repeated the side-by-side test, using the unmeat that I had preferred, alongside actual hamburger.
The bottom line: Both unmeats produced perfectly good versions of the chili.
The fine print: The cooking properties, mouth feel, and to a small degree the flavors, of the two unmeats differed, and should be taken into account if transforming a hamburger recipe.
The details: The story of the taste tests starts after the following self-indulgent historical aside, which you can skip by going directly to the RECIPE OVERVIEW, below.