Can Pat LaFrieda's 50CUT Mushroom Burger Blend Stand Up Against All-Beef Patties? We Found Out

The plant-based meat boom has seemingly become stagnant, though that hasn't stopped major players like Impossible Foods from continuing to release new products such as meatless hot dogs. The main problem is that no vegan meat substitutes have quite gotten the true meat replacement thing down yet, because key elements like taste and texture are still far off enough that those who love their meat still can't let go of beef burgers.

If you're actively looking to downsize your red meat consumption but still keep the satisfaction of a burger, then what are your other options? New York-based Pat Lafrieda Meat Purveyors and Mush Foods, a company that creates mushroom mycelium blends to mix with beef, poultry, blended meat, and blended seafood, have banded together to create a half-and-half blend of beef and mushroom called the Lafrieda 50CUT Burger. Pat Lafrieda is no slouch in the meat game — the company supplies beef to both high-end restaurants and Shake Shack.

As someone who's consciously trying (and failing) to find the right red meat replacement in his diet, I wanted to see if this approach would be more appealing than a full-on ditch-the-beef effort. Mushrooms and beef are a natural pairing; since mushrooms are full of umami flavor, the two ingredients have a cozy culinary friendship. Pat Lafrieda sent me a sample of its new partly plant-based burger patties and I grilled them up alongside traditional beef burgers to find out if 50CUT Burgers could help me lower my red meat consumption.

First of all, it's important to note that what's included in the 50CUT Burger patties isn't just bits of the mushroom fruiting body you know (the stem and the cap) — these pieces are combined with mycelium, the root structure that grows beneath a mushroom's substrate's surface. Mycelium has increasingly been the main ingredient in vegan meat replacements as of late; I was able to try a vegan fish replacement that uses mycelium to mimic raw fish some years back. 

Mycelium is also being used as the base for things like plant-based octopus and other meat substitutes. In terms of the actual mushrooms in the recipe, the 50CUT Burger blends the beef with oyster, trumpet, shiitake, and lion's mane, all of which I know to be quite flavorful. 

I asked the Lafrieda representative about how the mushrooms are treated before they go into the meat, because mushrooms typically release a ton of moisture when cooked. That could easily compromise the texture of a burger like this, causing it to fall apart or turning the end result into something watery and less flavorful than a beef burger. The representative told me that the mushroom and mycelium blend is chopped into small pieces and roasted before it gets added to the beef. 

Each 50CUT Burger is 6 ounces uncooked. In a side-by-side visual comparison of the raw products, the Lafrieda 50CUT Burger is slightly more brown than it is pink (it's the patty on the right in the photo above), though it still completely resembles ground beef. If you look closely at the meat, you'll notice tiny specks of mushroom material in it, but they're small, about the size of the grind of the beef.

Visually, it's pretty much just a raw burger, and it physically handles the same way. It definitely resembles real meat more than Impossible or Beyond products, which have strange bleach-white nodules of fat in them. It feels like you're dealing with food that hasn't come straight off some weird laboratory line. There's no special prep to be done before you cook them either — just season them how you'd normally season a burger and toss them in a pan or on your grill.

50CUT Burgers don't require much in the way of cooking time. In fact, Pat Lafrieda's recommended cooking instructions tell you to cook the half-and-half burgers for a short six minutes total over medium-high heat, flipping at mid-point, to get to a medium doneness. They firm up quickly, which means you can't walk away or get distracted. 

Your typical beef burger takes a little longer to get to medium doneness, about eight minutes total. Unfortunately, my grill seems to have different hot spots depending on the day of the week, so the end cook didn't quite come out exactly apples-to-apples. Fortunately, I've had a lifetime's worth of burger-eating experience, plus a pretty long food writing career, so I know how to get a feel for how the two types of burgers compare despite their final temperature difference.

Normally, of course, I dress my burgers with things like cheese, but for the purpose of this initial taste test, I simply salted both burgers before I cooked them. Then I put them on plain white buns, sans condiments, so I could get the best read on their flavor in comparison to each other.

My beef burger came out somewhere between medium-rare and rare, which is generally my preferred temp, as long as the beef is good (but thanks for nothing, inconsistent grill — I was aiming for medium), while the 50CUT Burger hit a solid medium. The regular Lafrieda burger was beefy, tender, and as juicy as expected, just like any ideal pub-sized burger should be. 

But the first bite of the 50CUT Burger had my mind going a million miles a minute for multiple reasons. One of them was its texture. The 50Cut has a finer grind than the all-beef burger, which means that the final result is more tightly packed. When you chew it, the patty disintegrates into smaller particles in your mouth. That seems like a nitpicky detail to point out, but it signals to your brain that you're not quite eating a normal burger. Fortunately, though it looks a little dry in the photo I took, it isn't — its moisture comes from both fat and water content. 

But the most notable thing about the 50CUT Burger is its flavor. It's not a straight beef analogue. The mushroom flavor hits you front and center with the beef flavor hanging out in the way back. Frankly, I love this, but that's because I'm particularly fond of mushrooms. It's more of a mushroom burger than a beef burger, and if you hate mushrooms, you're going to want to skip this. That being said, as long as you think of this more as a mushroom sandwich than a burger, you're going to love this thing and not be concerned about the beef.

Because of the mushroom flavor, you'll want to top this thing accordingly. Ketchup and mustard might be a bit strange on it, but if you put Swiss cheese and grilled onion on top, which is what I did with a second patty, you really won't need much else. This was a delicious pairing because mushroom, Swiss, and onion are a classic combination. I'm also thinking blue cheese and caramelized onions or A.1. Sauce mixed with mayo along with some arugula would work well. 

If the Lafrieda 50CUT Burgers was readily available in stores near me, I am sure I'd eventually grab some again, but for now, I'll have to settle with ordering them online. They're now available in a two-pack of 6-ounce burgers for $15.51 or a 10-pack for $69.80 on the Pat Lafrieda website. That's not cheap — it's about $7.75 per patty if you buy a two-pack and $6.98 per patty if you buy a 10-pack, so they run into the issue of cost-effectiveness. However, it's important to note that they're similarly priced to the beef burgers on Lafrieda's website, which are currently $15.05 for a two-pack.

As much as I enjoyed the 50CUT Burger, it might not be the red meat panacea that'll reduce our cattle carbon footprint as a whole. Ultimately, I think we'll just need to eat more plants instead of meat, plain and simple. I do believe that little changes eventually add up to big things, so if you're looking to make small tweaks to your lifestyle, this hybrid approach will definitely help — as long as you love mushrooms.