vegan jerky reviews

Reviews of vegan jerky, vegan meat floss, and other weird vegan snack meats

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UNEASY LISTENING

this blog is currently inactive! But check out my radio show, if I liked your post or followed you, it’s probably related to that! http://uneasylisteningradio.tumblr.com 

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Audio & Playlist for December 17, 2016: Infrastructure part 1

It’s infrastructure part 1 of 2! I could do a lot more than 2 of these but I’ve decided that 2 episodes of any given topic in a row is my max. It just gets to be a bit of the grind if I do any more than that. Maybe some time I’ll cheat and do a show just about roads/streets etc. Anyway, here it is! Next up, 2 shows for the holidays and then 1 more infrastructure show and then i don’t KNOW. I’d like to do a show heavy on the punk cause it’s been a while and I might lose my punk membership card.

Playlist:

Bay City Rollers - Saturday Night (Uneasy Listening theme song) Ram Jam - Turnpike Jimi Hendrix - Ezy Rider Jobriath - Street Corner Love Alice Donut - New Jersey Exit Louis Jordan - Pompton Turnpike Huggy Bear - Warming Rails Big Bill Broonzy - Lonesome Road Blues The Floating Opera - Back on the Street Again Billy Bragg - A13, Trunk Road to the Sea Chemtrails - Stop & Frisk The Collins Kids - Hot Rod Prince - Alphabet Street The Germs - My Tunnel Schoolhouse Rock - Electricity Marvin Gaye - Hitch Hike Chuck Berry - You Can't Catch Me Hellion - Living in a Sewer John D. Loudermilk - Road Hog Shangri La's - The Train to Kansas City Defiance Ohio - Bikes and Bridges Wall of Voodoo - On Interstate 15 Paul McCartney - Back Seat of My Car The Persuasions - Chain Gang Bessie Smith - Ticket Agent, Ease Your Window Down Hank Williams III - 87 Southbound Hank Williams - Lost Highway Carl Sandburg - Jay Gould's Daughter Michael Nesmith - Highway 99 with Melange The Cowsills - Indian Lake JFA - I-10 Robert Johnson - Terraplane Blues Ira Louvin - The Right Side of the Road New York Dolls - Subway Train All Girl Summer Fun Band - Down South, 10 hours, I-5 The Breeders - Drivin' on 9

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Louisville Vegan Jerky Co - Pete’s Bourbon Smoked Black Pepper

Oops I forgot to take a picture before I ate it all. So I was very excited about Louisville Vegan Jerky Co, they have so many different flavors but so far, they’ve all been kind of samey. Here we see Pete, I guess the pepperoni flavor jerky I reviewed had all of the flavor people assembled on the bag. Every bag has a different person who represents the flavor. So Pete represents bourbon smoked black pepper which is wayyy less exciting than it sounds. The jerky base is the same for all the Louisville jerkies. Fine but not exciting. A running theme here. It’s soy-based and a little chewy. The flavor really typifies PLAIN. It tastes like soy sauce with a teensy bit of sweetness and smokiness. I taste no bourbon. I taste not that much smoke. I taste BASICALLY NO BLACK PEPPER which is really disappointing to me; it’s not that hard to make things peppery! This tastes just fine but it’s not that special. I can’t believe that there are like 5 more of these to review, I might review the rest in one big post cause I am running out of things to say about them. Stay tuned though cause this was probably the most boring one and there *is* one that I like more than the others.

Ingredients:

Textured soy protein, tamari (water, soybeans, salt, alcohol [to preserve freshness]), olive oil. sorghum, garlic, onion, spices, vinegar, natural smoke flavor

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Sam’s Harvest Jerky - #19 Original Recipe Medium?

xHey, this is the stuff!

OK, this is probably the best vegan jerky I’ve ever had. There is nothing fancy or flashy about it but it satisfies all the requirements of jerky really well. Let me elaborate.

So, first of all, the packaging on this is wacky. What is it called? What flavor is it? My first impression was that it was Harvest Jerky Medium flavor. Then I saw oh, Sam’s up in the corner. Then I noticed the #19. #19 original recipe. What? #19(tm). OK. So I guess it’s Sam’s Harvest Jerky and the flavor is #19 original recipe and the spice level, which is relative to nothing because there is no other flavor of this, is just written really big. 

This jerky is made by the company which makes soy curls., which I have heard people say are very awesome and delicious but I haven’’t tried (except possibly without knowing it at fake meat Chinese restaurants). I believe they are dried out soy things that you rehydrate and then cook, kinda like TVP only in big chunks. Well differently shaped chunks than chunk-style TVP. Whatever. Anyway this jerky is made out of soy curls, which I guess are re-hydrated then dehydrated again?

So the jerky pieces range from biggish (3″ long or so) to little crumbles at the bottom of the bag. They look like they were actually smoked or something. I’m not even sure why I’m saying that but they just have a cooked look to them.  I totally take back what I said before about needing gluten to have a chewy jerky cause these are all soy and chewwwy. still not like shoe leather beef jerky chewy but they have a really satisfying bite and take a few chews to chew up. 

The flavor is delicious, soy saucey with a little bit of molasses-y sweetness, I don’t think I’ve come across another jerky that uses molasses  but that is an excellent idea. It doesn’t taste just like soy sauce and molasses - I can’t really identify the other spices in there but they are superbly balanced and have a lot of depth and interest. Also, this jerky is in fact medium spicy. Like there’s a lil undertone of spice there for sure, which is not always there in things that are supposed to be medium spicy. I would really like to try a spicy spicy version of this. 

Overall, this is the best jerky I’ve tried in quite some time and I will definitely be getting more, and watching out for new flavors. It’s also a really good value at $5.50 for 4 oz, compared to other hippie jerkies that cost the same or more for lower weights. 

I award this 16 1/2 tempehs which are even better than tofus. I also give them an ironic 2 seitan bonus score.

Ingredients:

Butler Soy Curls (whole non-GMO soybeans), oil (safflower, soy), unsulphured molasses, vinegar (distilled white), organic tamari (organic soybeans, salt, alcohol), hydrolized corn protein, maltodextrin, hydrolized soy protein, natural smoke flavor, onion dried, red pepper, carageenan, garlic dried, citric acid, spices, potassium sorbate.

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Louisville Vegan Jerky: Perfect Pepperoni

Here’s a fancypants limited edition pepperoni jerky from fancypants jerky maker Louisville Vegan Jerky Co.. I’ve always been a bit mystified by the fake meat industry’s inability to properly replicate the distinctive flavor of pepperoni, which is really all about the spices. It seems like if you got the spices right, even if the “we ground up the whole pig!” texture was missing you’d still have a pretty awesome thing to eat. But no one can do it! And sadly, Louisville Jerky Co.is no exception. 

The packaging is the hipsteriest jerky packaging I have ever seen, all old-timey with a bunch of pictures of ye olde 1910s people across the top who I guess are probably the jerky makers old-fashionified. Whatever, this kind of aesthetic looks cool enough. And I appreciate the resealable bag.

The jerky is soy only (no gluten) and well, it looks a lot like poop. But I mean, it’s jerky, and that’s kinda how jerky looks sometimes. The pieces range in size from tiny chunks to pieces that are a few inches long.

The texture is very soft; there’s the teensiest bit of resistance when you tear off a piece with your teeth but not much, and it’s gone really fast once you start chewing. It’s moist but not wet or greasy at all.

The flavor is  decent, but just not pepperoni-y.  The ingredients include fennel, which is a really key component of pepperoni spices, but I can’t taste it and it’s definitely not whole fennel seeds in there. There are some spice bits in the bottom of the bag, but it looks like black pepper is the only thing that wasn’t mixed into the uh jerky dough. It actually tastes really really similar to Stonewall Jerquee’s pepperoni flavor, but minus Stonewall’s awesome weird texture. it tastes very smoky, which is not really a normal characteristic of pepperoni. Paprika flavor is very strong. There is a decent amount of heat. It’s really salty, even for jerky.

This jerky is tasty but I would have liked it better if it didn’t promise me pepperoni! I also prefer a chewier jerky and I don’t know if that’s possible without wheat gluten.

Ingredients: Textured Soy (Whole Bean), San-J Tamari, Olive Oil, Natural Smoke, Black Pepper, Mustard Seed, Paprika, Garlic Powder, Sugar, Fennel, Red Pepper Flakes.

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Vegan Dream Vegetarian Jerky: Hot Chili Pepper

VEGAN JERKY BLOG IS BACK, HELLO THERE! I have a bunch of jerkies to review in the near future and here is the first one!

Vegan dream jerky comes in one big flat sheet, as you can see. It measures about 3 1/2″ x 5″. It is moderately chewy, one of the chewier vegan jerkies I have come across. It has some internal fibers going on but it’s kind of one dimensional texture wise (you can’t really feel those fibers tearing apart in your mouth or separate them with your teeth) and something about the texture is like.... not food. I can’t think of a description that doesn’t make it sound grosser than it is but it’s a little like.... very soft flexible cardboard, or really cheap fake leather? But it’s not gross. I swear. It’s kind of satisftying to rip a chunk off with your teeth although it doesn’t take long to chew it up and swallow it.

The appearance is a little shiny on the surface, a little fibrous on the inside, with visible bits of black pepper. It is a pretty realistic approximation of a weird sheet of dried beef.

The taste is really strong garlic powder taste, pretty strong soy sauce, a little smoky, a little.... tomato-y? (yes, checked the ingredients, there’s tomato paste in there). Not spicy initially but when you’re almost done chewing it suddenly busts out a pretty spicy kick that sticks around for a while. I say “pretty spicy” but my spice tolerance is pretty high, I think some people might classify it as “really spicy”. The packaging says it’s “A Spice that’ll wake up your taste buds!”

I don’t know if I would go out of my way to get this jerky but I would eat it in a pinch, especially as compared to other deliberately vegan hippie type jerkies (as opposed to the asian supermarket type jerkies which, so far, win out over the hippies every time - probably because of msg) that I have reviewed thusfar. I give it 20 tofus out of 32.

BTW, I just typed up the ingredients and noticed that there’s psyllium husk in there, which made me think of this excellent package design:

Ingredients:

Wheat gluten, defatted soy flour, garlic powder, onion powder, chili pepper paste (chipotle peppers, tomato paste, garlic, onion, sugar, vegetable oil, corn starch, lemon juice, vinegar, hickory smoke, spices), sea salt, psyllium husk, vitamin C, soy sauce (water, extract of soy beans, wheat flour, salt, sugar).

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Te Chang Food Towfu Cake: Vegetarian Flavor

Te Chang makes some of my favorite veggie jerkies, but I'd never tried this one. The package has a cool neon green and purple thing going on, and of course the jerky itself is BRIGHT RED which is pretty cool. And probably not bad for humans at all, right?

It comes in little shredded chunks, unlike most Te Chang jerkies which are long strips. It is very wet and oily, which is pretty typical. It's also chewier than other varieties. It says it's "towfu (bean curd)" on the package but this is clearly a wheat gluten product (confirmed by the ingredients list), and it has some good chew and texture to it.

The flavor is along the lines of a sweet and sour sauce from Americanized Chinese food, but a little more complex. It's VERY sweet but also  salty and savory. There is a bit of a citrusy/pineapple flavor and it also has a very subtle lingering spiciness. I ate this all in like 10 minutes because it is delicious. I award it 4 million tofus on my rating scale of tofus.

Ingredients:

wheat gluten, soybean oil, sugar, soy sauce (water, soybeans, wheat, sugar, salt), salt, spices (chili powder), additive caramel, msg, potassium sorbate, red 40 

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Joytofu Skewered Vegetarian Meat: Chicken Sauce Flavor

This is the most realistic looking fake meat I have reviewed so far on this blog. It definitely looks like a little mini version of beef skewers like you get from a cart on the street in a Chinatown. Dare I say it is kinda cute!

You get 7 skewers of fake meat per package. It being on a skewer serves no purpose, except that I guess the skewers are SLIGHTLY less oily than the fake meat part (which is pretty damn oily) so you can hold it by the skewer while you eat it for slightly less oily fingers. I generally don't believe in eating things off of skewers because it's usually just awkward and I end up stabbing myself in the mouth. 

The ingredients on this are microscopic but this is obviously soy based fake meat, more dried tofu from Joytofu. The texture is pretty much the same as their other stuff, dense and chewy and uniform.

What looks like one continuous piece of soy meat on the skewer is actually 3 separate pieces on each one, which does make it a bit easier to eat. You can see in the photo that there are visible Szechuan peppercorns and red chili flakes on these, but neither flavor is as prominent as you'd guess by looking at it. It's a little spicy and a little peppercorn-y but the peppercorn has more of a piney taste and not so much of the bitterness or tingling you usually get from this spice. Who knows, maybe it's just something that looks and tastes similar but not the same thing. It leaves a really nice lingering flavor of spices, sesame oil, and soy sauce in your mouth for a couple of minutes. One thing i like about this is it's not sweet at all, which is unusual for fake jerkies.

Overall, this is pretty good but you get surprisingly little per package. I ate 4 skewers at work yesterday and it seemed like nothing. 

It took me a while to figure out what these were called, if anything, but then I noticed a label with teeny tiny writing on the back that said "Chicken sauce flavor skewers of (Xiangxiangzui)". I googled xiangxiangzui and it means dried bean curd so that seems right. Although I don't know what chicken sauce is supposed to taste like normally.

Ingredients: Soybean tissue protein, water, vegetable oil, pepper, pepper (yes pepper twice, maybe it's a typo or maybe 2 kinds of pepper?), salt, spices, white sugar, sesame seeds (I tasted a sesame taste but didn't notice any seeds, maybe they're ground up or pressed into oil), food additives, flavor nucleotides disodium salt, food flavor 

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Primal Strips - Hot & Spicy, Teriyaki, and Thai Peanut

Primal strips are omnipresent in health food stores, co-ops, and other hippie haunts. They come in single-serving packages, and the ingredients are all fancy and natural. They don't have MSG unlike the Asian grocery type jerkies, but seriously dude, if you're not allergic to MSG it's no worse for you than salt.

Hot & Spicy

Yep, it is a strip. A brown strip. This strip is moist but not oily to the touch. The texture is medium chewy and fibrous. Hot & spicy has a higher mushroom content than the other two flavors (which have more wheat gluten) and this seems to make it chewier and drier. It's still not a lot of work to chew this up. I'm still searching for a vegan jerky that really takes some effort to chew; it may not exist.

It smells very strongly of soy sauce and the flavor is underlying soy and shiitake mushroom, a bit sweet, with strong black pepper flavors providing the spice. It's not super duper spicy (keep in mind I have a very strong tolerance for spice), but there is a spiciness unlike some other food products that are supposed to be spicy and are just sweet or a teensy bit peppery. It has a little bit of an afterburn. It is pretttty salty and made me want to have a drink right away.

Teriyaki

Teriyaki is lighter colored, softer and wetter than hot & spicy, and much easier to pull apart. The wheat gluten-based strip comes apart in layers, with a texture which will be familiar to you if you've ever had fried gluten from  a can. Kind of... rubbery, but not in an unpleasant way. Like snappy rubbery. What am I even talking about.

The flavor is mild, a little sour,  fairly sweet. Pretty typical teriyaki flavor. Kinda boring both in flavor and texture when compared to the other two.

Thai Peanut

This is the same wheat-gluteny texture as the teriyaki. It's possibly even wetter with peanut sauce on the outside of it.

The flavor is great - like a mild Thai peanut sauce. There is a distinct lime taste, and Thai basil is actually listed in the ingredients and you can definitely taste it. It actually tastes less sweet to me than the teriyaki, which is surprising since the sugar content is higher. It's not spicy at all

Overall, these are good enough for when I'm hungry at the hippie store and I want a salty, satisfying snack to tide me over, but they're not something I get cravings for. I'd like to have the flavor of the Thai peanut with the texture and heat level of the hot & spicy, but this would probably still not be a top #1 jerky for me even then. Not chewy enough, too wet, not delicious enough.

Hot & Spicy Ingredients: shitake mushrooms, water, naturally brewed soy sauce (water, non gmo soybeans, wheat, sea salt), expeller pressed canola oil, licorice root, non-gmo vital gluten (wheat protein), seaweed extract, unrefined evaporated cane juice, non-gmo isolated high fiber soy protein, sea salt, natural vegetarian spices.

One package is one serving and contains 334 mg of sodium.

Teriyaki Ingredients: Non-gmo vital gluten (wheat protein), water, naturally brewed soy sauce (water, non gmo soybeans, wheat, sea salt), expeller pressed canola oil, licorice root, unrefined evaporated cane juice, sea salt, natural vegetarian spices. 314 mg sodium.

Thai peanut ingredients: Non-gmo vital gluten (wheat protein), water, unrefined evaporated cane juice, naturally brewed soy sauce (water, non gmo soybeans, wheat, sea salt), expeller pressed canola oil, peanut butter, vinegar, fresh Thai basil, sea salt, natural vegetarian spices. 353mg sodium.

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Joytofu Vegetarian Meat

And here it is, my first review! I got this bag of Joytofu brand Vegetarian Meat at the Asian Market. It was the most expensive veggie jerky there, at a whopping $3.69 for the bag. However, it's also a huge bag, with 7.5 ounces of vegetarian meat in there! So pound for pound it's probably the same as the other kinds, which are more like $.99-1.29 for 2 oz.

The vegetarian meat itself comes in little individual vacuum sealed packages in three flavors: yellow, orange, and red. There are 4 of each flavor. There is no English on the packages but you can see just by looking at them that they are different from each other. You can also see that they are very oily.

First of all, you should know that I have a super high tolerance for spicy food, so if I say something is kinda spicy, you may find it very very very spicy depending on your palate. Some of these are kinda spicy so you should know!

So let's start with yellow flavor:

You can see that there are visible red pepper flakes in here, but this is not as spicy as the red. It has a dry tofu texture, nicely chewy but it doesn't have stringy fibers like wheat gluten does (oh how I love stringy fibers!). The taste is just a little spicy, with a hot-doggish flavor and it seems like there is some Szechuan peppercorn in there (hard to describe if you haven't had it, it tastes a little bitter and makes your tongue tingle and it is great). All around it is salty and soy sauce and spicy tingly tasting.

On to orange:

This one is mild, and a little sweet, like sweet soy sauce. This would be a reasonable fake pork (like the pork in pork fried rice). Same dry tofu texture as the yellow, I think the base protein is the same for all of them. The other two are more exciting but this would be a good chilled-out choice for snacking on when you are feeling tame.

And finally, red:

I apologize for the photo, this one came out looking weird and glistening and gross no matter what I did. Unlike the other two which are STUNNINGLY BEAUTIFUL! This is my favorite, and also the spiciest. It has red sauce with lots of visible red pepper flakes and tastes like the red pepper oil you get at Chinese restaurants if you ask for it. Exactly like that. I'm pretty sure that's what's on it. Only it's taken the form of nice chewy snacky soy jerky and there's a little bit of sweetness in the jerky part. Awesome. I award it 5 tofus. 

All in all, this is a nice selection of different soy jerkies, and they will last pretty much literally forever (if you don't eat them right away!) because of the tiny packets. You can send them to school with your weird kid for snacks, so the other kids will make fun of their weird food! I think the actual intended purpose of these guys is to go on top of soup or rice, but who knows.

Ingredients (there is just one ingredients list for the whole bag): Soybean texture protein, water, vegetable oil, salt food (!), additives (MSG, disodium 5'-ribonucleotide, edible essence), sugar, spice, chili, chinese prickly ash

Supposedly there are 3 2.5 oz servings in this bag and each one only has 150 mg of sodium but that seems impossible.

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Jerky incoming!!

I just went to the Asian market and obtained a big bag of veggie fake meat snacks! Reviews are coming soon. I will be reviewing vegan jerkies I find in Asian markets as well as hippie ones from the co-op/internet, at least one review a week (I don't want to explode my veins and these guys are SALTY so i can't just eat them/review them nonstop even though I want to!) I also might stray a bit to review weird vegan fake meats like vegan roast pig and vegan cod and vegan (something not in english).

If any vegan jerky manufacturers want to send me some stuff to review, well I cannot truthfully say that was not a motivation in creating this blog! Send me an ask or whatever! You kids today with your tumblies!

[veganjerky]

Hello this is the purpose of this blog!

Hello! And welcome to my vegan jerky blog. There is a real shortage on the internet of reviews of salty chewy vegan fake meat snacks, and I intend to remedy that!! STAY TUNED!!!