Early in lockdown, without the option to order my groceries online as usual, I bought a £35 ‘essentials box’ from Morrisons – a pre-packaged order of necessary basic supplies. I opted for the veggie version, which came with a number of Meatless Farm Co items, including two packs of their mince.
I’d already heard of Meatless Farm Co, but had never really been tempted to try their range. I didn’t cook much with mince – other than bolognese or chilli for the children, and then I used Quorn. So, once I had the chance to give it a go, I was genuinely interested to see what this would be like.
Tastes like meat?
Well, yes – but not like beef mince as expected. If anything, I think that this tastes like cooked corned beef. So much so that I made it into a batch of pretty decent ‘corned beef’ pasties (so decent in fact that I’ve since bought this mince on a number of other occasions in order to make more pasties!). The texture is also more corned beef-ish; it doesn’t have the bite of standard beef or lamb mince, so I found it didn’t work as well in sauces like bolognese or chilli. In that sense, it’s not as versatile as Quorn mince.
Easy to cook with?
Erm , again, yes, but not as expected. As I said above, it doesn’t hold up well in sauces. In fact, cooking it with any liquid makes it disintegrate into – frankly – mush. But I found that dry frying it separately worked well. Cooking it this way gave it that corned beef taste and texture. I’ve used it this way and added it to rice (to make a fake keema rice for curry), and to a kapuska. In this sense, it could be added to sauces at the last stage once cooked, but that always seems like too much hard work for me – I’d rather just leave it out and add mushrooms, lentils or beans which can cook in the sauce instead. Might seem lazy of me, but I like my mince sauce to be low maintenance.
Value for money?
As mentioned in the intro, I first got this as part of a groceries box from Morrison’s, so the individual cost wasn’t really an issue. Also, I was never a big mince consumer when I ate meat and don’t really have a frame of reference in terms of pricing. So I guess it’s best to just compare this directly with Quorn, which is basically what this would replace.
And in that sense, it’s pretty inline price-wise. This costs £3 for 400g (unfrozen/fresh); Quorn is £3 for 500g (frozen) or £3.20 for 350g (fresh), so all much-of-a-much really. For me, that’s pretty good value – I got four large pasties out of half a pack, and I could easily get three meals out of a full pack if pushed.
FINAL VERDICT
Since I was initially uninterested in Meatless Farm Co products until my Morrison’s box, I have been somewhat converted to their mince, primarily because it offers me something I wasn’t expecting to find – a decent plant-based replacement for corned beef. That makes it a fairly regular addition to my shopping list now. It’s a bit strange to cook with given it’s tendency to ‘mush up’ in sauces, so I don’t think it’s an easy substitution for meat mince in general. Still, a nice one to add to the vegan fridge.
