Mexican cuisine is pretty friendly to vegetarians — it’s usually easy enough to substitute beef for beans and get the protein and flavor you need. However, if you’re making tacos and you’re really craving ground beef, Beyond Meat Feisty Beef Crumbles is one meatless alternative you could try. Unfortunately, when you eat these crumbles, you’ll probably wish that you were eating regular old beans.
It’s easy enough to cook up a bag of this faux beef. Toss a little oil in the pan, add in some frozen crumbles, and stir as needed. It took less than five minutes to thaw everything out and get it ready to eat. Our crumbles left quite a bit of mess behind, so we’d definitely recommend spraying your pan down before you start cooking.
So how convincing are these faux meat crumbles? Well, true carnivores won’t be fooled. These have a hard, rubbery consistency that makes them really chewy, and they also have a subtle aftertaste that’s a little but plastic-y. While they attempt to mimic the texture of ground beef, they have a smoothness to them that ground beef would never have naturally.
We’re also not sure that the “feisty” descriptor is all that accurate. This faux beef is seasoned with onion, garlic, and chili pepper, but the overall flavor isn’t very strong. We kicked things up by adding in some taco seasoning, but we’d actually recommend pairing these crumbles with a good enchilada sauce. Because they’re on the dry side, a good sauce could cover up some of their shortcomings.
While we’ve been impressed with the quality of Beyond products in the past, these beef crumbles aren’t anything to write home about. You might be able to mask some of their issues by adding in other ingredients, but you’d probably be better off using a different product altogether. Beyond Meat has mastered veggie burgers, but they definitely have a long way to go when it comes to imitating ground beef!
To learn more about the cooking instructions, ingredients, or nutritional content for these vegetarian crumbles, check out our package scans below.
