Quorn Turk'y Roast

This week, I'm doing a special 3-part holiday extravaganza. With Thanksgiving coming up, I thought I should review a fake turkey product. I ended up doing three! Two commercial roasts, and one from scratch! So I had some people over, fixings were gathered (mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, brussels sprouts, stuffing, gravy, and apple cobbler for dessert), roasts were... roasted, and then we excitedly dug in. The sides were all vegetarian (except for the stuffing - the person who was supposed to bring the stuffing couldn't make it, so I had to resort to a last minute chicken-flavored popular boxed stuffing.) The gravy, however, was made from scratch, with a homemade vegetable stock. I'll post the recipe in a separate entry after this post.

Because of the huge amount of information, I'm going to break this up into three separate reviews - one posted today, one tomorrow, and the final one on Sunday, so if you still haven't figured out what to have for Thanksgiving, hopefully this info will help guide you.

First off, the Quorn brand turk'y roast. I was very excited for this one, as I've heard good things about Quorn. Here's what the website says about this roast: "Turk'y roast - deliciously succulent for holiday meals and tasty sandwiches!"

My dictionary has "succulent" defined as "tender, juicy, and tasty". Let's address each of these adjectives in turn, with quotes from the diners and me.

Tender:
"ABYSMAL texture", "too firm for my taste", "crumbly", "texture is fine"

Juicy:
"meh! dry", "oh so dry; not better with gravy", "dry"

Tasty:
"I bet this is supposed to taste like white meat, which I don't like anyway", "fairly turkey-like taste", "very little turkey flavor - D", "little bit sweet, fairly bland", "bland", "flavor: D"

I'd go ahead and vote down the description of "succulent" based on these comments. But how similar was it to actual turkey? The consensus seemed to be that it looked and felt and (for the most part) tasted like dry, overcooked white meat turkey. Some of us, myself included, couldn't get past the texture though. I hate dry meat, and as it turns out, dry fake meat is no better.

The experience:
Texture - F
Flavor - D-

Final grade for this attempt: F

Tomorrow, I will review an actual brand-name Tofurky roast! Can it live up to the hype? Stay tuned!