MOS Burger's Vegan Green Burger, Tried
Translated from my original Japanese post (2020). 日本語の原文を読む →
Salut! It's Yoko, a food blogger who's casually going vegan.
MOS Burger has released a vegan hamburger! It's called the "Green Burger"!
It was so good that you'd never guess there's no meat in it, so I'm sharing it with you.
Green Burger Specs
The official name of the Green Burger is MOS PLANT BASED GREEN BURGER.
Plant based
-> This means it uses plant-based ingredients and no animal products.
Green burger
-> Green is MOS's brand color, a color associated with health and the environment, and the bun is green too!
The Green Burger has been on sale since Thursday, May 21, 2020 at MOS Burger stores nationwide (excluding some stores).
The price is ¥538 (excluding tax).
For comparison, the classic MOS Burger is ¥343 and other items are in the ¥400s, so it's a little pricey.
But I think MOS Burger is the only burger chain selling such a carefully crafted vegan burger, so considering that, it's a bargain lol
No Garlic or Onion Either (the Five Pungent Vegetables)
The Green Burger isn't just free of animal products; its concept was to avoid the "gokun" (five pungent vegetables) as well, which made development extremely difficult, and it reportedly took a year and a half to complete.
That's a pretty strict set of conditions...
The gokun are five strong-smelling vegetables whose consumption is forbidden in Buddhism and some other traditions (leeks and green onions, rakkyo, nira chives, garlic and onions).
Garlic seems to give you energy, and onions and green onions are tasty and seem good for you, so what's wrong with them?! I looked into the gokun.
A diet that avoids not only animal products but also the gokun is called Oriental vegan.
Apparently in Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India, the gokun are considered foods that "only perk you up for a moment after you eat them".
In the Buddhist world too they are said to be "foods that stir up worldly desires and get in the way of training," and at the gates of Zen temples there is sometimes a sign reading "Kunshu sanmon ni iru wo yurusazu" (no strong-smelling foods or alcohol allowed through the temple gate!).
It's easy to understand alcohol being a worldly desire, but why the gokun... I suppose it would be hard to concentrate if a monk's breath smelled bad lol
Whether they really are that bad for the body, I'll look into it another time.
The Story Behind the Green Burger's Development
The Green Burger took a long time to develop, and I wondered how they did it, then found this video.
It's a must-watch. You get the real behind-the-scenes story lol
The developer was worried by their boss asking "Are you sure about this?" and nearly gave up several times...
You can feel how hard they worked, and it really got to me...
Thank you for creating something so delicious!!
I Tried the Green Burger!
On a weekday while working remotely, I wanted a Green Burger, so I pre-ordered on the MOS Burger website.
You could choose a pickup time starting about 30 minutes later.
If you order in advance, it's convenient for anyone worried about COVID, since you just pick it up and you're in and out quickly.
I'd never pre-ordered before, so I didn't know this, but when you pre-order they give you ¥10 toward your phone bill when you pick up. I was surprised.
The Green Burger is built like this: bun, tomato, tomato sauce, patty, lettuce, bun.
The bun is green and moist and chewy.
To get that moist, chewy feel, a regular bun uses butter, but here they recreate it with soy milk cream.
It's honestly so moist you wouldn't know if I told you it had butter in it.
The green bun is cute too! It has spinach kneaded into it.
The thick-cut tomato and the tomato sauce taste almost the same as on a regular MOS Burger!
And then the patty, which they struggled with the most.
What?! It totally tastes like meat!!
If you look at the cross-section photo of a bite, you can see there's something like chopped onion in the patty.
I thought, oh, juicy onion, but it's actually cabbage... (see the development story video).
Even though I knew it was onion-free, it was so sweet and tasty that I got it wrong.
It also has a firm, springy, meat-like bite recreated with konnyaku (konjac), and it was a truly impressive result.
It also seems that the patty developed for the Green Burger can be swapped in for the patties of 11 classic menu items.
MOS Burger, Teriyaki Burger, MOS Vegetable Burger, Hamburger, Cheeseburger, MOS Cheeseburger, Spicy MOS Burger, Spicy MOS Cheeseburger, Natsumi MOS Vegetable, Morning Vegetable Burger (morning only), Morning Vegetable Cheeseburger (morning only)
For example, switching to a soy patty apparently doesn't change the price, so you can enjoy the classic MOS Burger sauce and make just the patty vegan!
That way, I think both hardcore vegans and flexitarians can enjoy it casually!?
If there's a MOS Burger near you, please try the Green Burger at least once!
