I Ate 3D Printed "Steak" Made From Plants, And It Blew My Mind

Your intrepid Banter reporter took great risks to get you this incredible tale of terrible music, awful cologne, and amazingly real fake meat.

Redefine Meat’s “steak”. Image via Youtube.

by Ben Cohen

I began writing this piece before I developed iron-deficiency anemia. I had not eaten meat for over three years when a terrifying bout of heart palpitations and a trip to urgent care forced a radical change in my diet.

I am back to eating animal protein again and feeling much better for it, but still have an interest in plant-based meat alternatives. I wrote a big piece for The Daily Beast on mycelium (mushroom) based “meat” last year, and have followed the industry as it continues to evolve.

If you’ve ever eaten an Impossible Burger, you’ll have some idea of how far things have come. The chemistry and tech behind this new meat is extremely impressive, and some products come astonishingly close to the real thing. I’ve even managed to impress my beef loving Paraguayan father-in-law with a burger he genuinely felt tasted like meat.

New innovations are now making it possible to go beyond the humble burger, and on to more complex forms of animal proteins. You can now eat steaks made entirely of plants that look like steaks, smell like steaks and even bleed like steaks. But do they taste like steaks?

Thankfully, your intrepid Banter reporter is willing to take extreme risks to get the big stories, so I went on a danger filled mission to find out.

3-D printed what?

A few months managed to convince my wife to go to a Steakhouse in London to try a plant-based “steak” that supposedly tastes just like the real thing. This wasn’t any old vegan steak though — this was a 3D printed, plant-based fillet made by a revolutionary tech company in Israel named “Redefine Meat”.

There are only a handful of restaurants in the world serving these steaks, and while we were staying in London I figured we’d go to one of them to celebrate our 6th wedding anniversary. We made reservations for Mr. White’s, a high-end chain restaurant founded by three Michelin starred chef Marco Pierre White, and planned babysitting for the evening.