Trader Joe's Soy Chorizo

This week, I gave Trader Joe's brand of fake meats a chance to redeem itself with their Soy Chorizo. I had planned to do another head-to-head competition with some chorizo a friend of mine made when we were making sausages in school last week, but it wasn't going to be a fair fight. The homemade chorizo was in a natural casing, and I was going to cook it and slice it up. The soy chorizo came in a sausage-looking form, but the casing had to be removed before cooking, since it was just a plastic tube. I took a picture of what the fake meat looked like once I squeezed it all out of the tube, but honestly, you don't want to know what it looked like. It was not a flattering picture. It had no structure, and would have had to be used in a ground-meat form, which I deemed too different from the sausage form of the real-meat version, so I saved the soy chorizo for this afternoon.

I didn't get things in order in time to eat it for breakfast, so we had our breakfast burritos for lunch. I think it still works. I was a little worried about the spiciness factor. Chorizo is supposed to be spicy, but the super-red color and the fact that my nostrils were tingling warned me that this might be a little too spicy. I did pop a little bit into my mouth to test it out, and at first it wasn't too bad, but the heat built up over time. I knew I was going to have to temper it with other ingredients, hence the breakfast burrito. I used some frozen hash browns I had in my freezer, I chopped up an onion, mixed in the fake chorizo, threw in a few eggs and a handful of cheese, then stirred it all together until the egg was cooked and the cheese was all melty. Then I heated up a couple tortillas, spooned in the mega-breakfast mixture, topped it with some sour cream, folded up the tortilla, and dug in.

Turns out, adding all that other stuff (likely mostly due to the sour cream) managed to mellow out the spice enough for me to be able to eat it. Now, this is only the second time I've eaten chorizo, so I can't really speak to the authenticity of the flavor, but it was pretty tasty. The texture was your pretty standard soy-crumble texture, which is not unpleasant, but also isn't super meaty. I think the breakfast burrito is a pretty good application of this product. So there you go, Trader Joe's - I gave you a second chance, and it paid off. I'd eat this again.

The experience:
Texture - chewy, but in an odd yet not unpleasant way
Flavor - pretty tasty - no weird fake-meat over- or undertones

Final grade for this attempt: B+