Stewed meat now also has a plant-based variant

TOP bv has succeeded in developing a full vegan variant of Dutch sour meat. With some minor adaptations this technology could also be used to make a vegan beef bourguignon or beef rendang.

“When we started this project, we had applications for the snack market in mind,” says TOP bv product developer Justus Veenemans. “We wanted to develop a vegan substitute for Dutch sour meat. A tasty product with a long shelf life, canned, and easily prepared on a plate in the microwave.”

The project, which has been finalised in 2022, built upon TOP’s earlier work. A challenge that was faced during the process is the necessity of an intense heat treatment of the vegetal starting ingredients. It sterilises the product and grants it a long shelf life, however, this is at the expense of the product texture. The solution was found to be a specific combination of vegetal ingredients with a high heat tolerance. “Finding this combination is a trick of the trade,” says the product developer.

“We discovered that with this technology we could not only make Dutch sour meat for snack bars, but also vegan and ready-to-eat equivalents of traditional stewed meat, Indonesian beef rendang, goulash and beef bourguignon. The possibilities are endless.”

The starting ingredients of the vegan stewed meat are a combination of vegetal proteins and vegetal texturizing agents. “We add almost no fat to our products,” Veenemans concludes. “But that does not affect the flavour”.

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