5 Delicious New Bay Area Plant-Based Foods That Are Actually Good for You

From Jessica Yadegaran’s story in the East Bay Times

At a recent $250-a-plate dinner called A Taste of the Future, Los Angeles celebrity vegan chef Nicole Derseweh delighted an elite group of plant-eaters in San Francisco with the next wave of planet-conscious delicacies.

They started with dollops of seaweed caviar on smoked carrot lox; sips of whiskey produced from flavor and aroma molecules; and nibbles of spicy faux chicken drumettes made from chickpeas. Diners dusted off the meal with milkless ash-rimmed brie; foie gras created from mycelium, part of the root structure of mushrooms; and honey made without bees.

What sets these foods apart, besides their futuristic flair, is that most are actually good for you and made in a way that doesn’t harm the planet, something that is yet to be determined when it comes to mainstream plant-based foods, especially alternative proteins.

That’s what brought this group together. The dinner, held at The Brixton, a New American lounge in South Beach, was part of Future Food-Tech, the annual conference for the global food-tech industry. This year, investors and startups were razor-focused on sustainability and clean, traceable ingredients in an industry that is expected to reach $74 billion by 2025.

So, what tasted good, with ingredients we could actually pronounce? We sampled our way through both days of the conference and cast our net further to find new Northern California plant-based foods that check all the boxes.

Here are five that impressed us:

San Francisco-based Black Sheep Foods specializes in plant-based heritage breed meats and wild game. Its first product, a ground “lamb” that hit the market last year, makes a juicy, flavorful kebab. Since 2019, co-founder Sunny Kumar and his food scientists have developed flavor compounds that hit your nose first — like they did when we were hunter-gatherers — re-creating the essence of lamb, only better.

Black Sheep’s version is less gamy, just-greasy-enough, and, when mixed with aromatics and grilled, mimics the texture and sensory experience of a fine burger. The faux lamb has roughly the same fat and protein as the real thing, with none of the environmental degradation of lamb, which ranks worst among all domesticated meat sources. Next up? Duck.https://5be9ee56cd018134965571d059f1e982.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Details: On the menu at Souvla, Ettan, Oren’s Hummus Shop and other Bay Area restaurants; https://blacksheepfoods.com

[Read more at the East Bay Times]