Boca All American Flame Grilled Burger

Culinary school started up again this week. The first class we take this semester is Basic Meat, Fish, and Poultry Principles, colloquially known as "the butchery class". This has, understandably, distracted me from my fake meat experimentation. So today, for lunch, I am currently eating a Boca All American Flame Grilled Burger. Here we go!

To start with, a brief rant. I was looking at some stuff on the internet yesterday, that reminded me of why I started this website in the first place. It was a recipe for some veggie sausages (homemade… stay tuned) and the person who had written it said it had been a very long time since she'd eaten a real-meat sausage, but this veggie sausage was very similar to how she remembered it. Now, I haven't yet made this veggie sausage, and maybe it is very similar to real-meat sausages. But the fact that she completely discredited herself as a person able to describe an item's similarity to meat frustrated me. So that said, I want you all to know that for dinner last night, I ate a real-meat cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, and ketchup. I also had the leftovers for breakfast. (I'm hard core like that) So the experience of eating a hamburger is very fresh in my mind.

I took the box of burgers out of the freezer, removed one of the individually-packaged patties, and tossed it into my nonstick skillet with about a teaspoon of olive oil. I flipped it a couple times, then topped it with a slice of my favorite processed cheese. I'm not sorry about this. Some things just melt better, and since I was eating fake meat, I might as well eat fake cheese. I also grabbed a slice of tomato and a nice crisp leaf of lettuce. I was going to do this right or not at all. The final touch: a nice big dollop of ketchup.

My first-bite impression was that this burger definitely has a "flame-grilled" flavor. It also comes with little painted-on grill marks, which is cute. I'm not entirely sure what chemicals give it that flavor, but they got it dead-on. This thing tasted undeniably flame-grilled. It also did not taste like beef, but I could convince myself that it did, thanks to the artificial flame-grilled flavor. I honestly believe a meat-eater could be satisfied with this. Possibly not without all the accoutrements, but why would you bother otherwise? This was very tasty, and I quickly devoured the entire thing, and am currently contemplating a second burger.

The experience:
Texture - nice and crispy on the outside from cooking it in oil - highly recommend this method
Flavor - flame-grilled goodness, with no weirdness to compete

I can definitely see this going spectacularly with some potato chips and some corn on the cob. Oh man…I wish I had some corn on the cob right now.

Final grade for this attempt: A+