I was at Bed Bath and Beyond, probably because I had a coupon or something, and I found myself wandering around the mini World Market section. I grabbed the usual suspects, Tim Tams, some fancy teas, and a bunch of European candy bars, when this caught my eye. I Can't Believe it's Not Hamburger beef jerky. At first, the name made me think it might be a vegetarian product, but it isn't, and then I was curious about how this might actually taste. In my mind, this would taste like beef jerky cured in Big Mac sauce, which sounded really appealing, so I figured it was worth a shot!
So, will I believe that this isn't a Hamburger? Let's find out!~
When opened, it smells like ketchup mustard, onion, lots of Worcestershire sauce, and I can even smell pickles! The aroma is shockingly spot on, although it seems like someone was a little heavy-handed with the Worcestershire. I took a look at the ingredients, and the gang is all here! We've got beef (duh), tomatoes, onion, garlic, Worcestershire sauce, pickled cucumber juice (I guess you can't just say pickle juice?), about five different iterations of vinegar, and mustard seed. (Along with a bunch of other stuff.) Pretty much everything you'd ever want in a burger, minus the bun.
Inside, the majority of the jerky pieces were rope-shaped bits with only one or two large flat pieces in the entire bag. Not a great textural mix, but hopefully they'll all taste as good as they smell.
Like the smell indicated, they went a little hard on the Worcestershire. At first, the hard-to-pronounce sauce overpowers everything, but as you chew you start to taste more ketchup, mustard, and onion followed by smokey char'd hamburger. Despite all the flavors evoking savory sauces, the jerky leaves my mouth incredibly dry with a bold yellow mustard and ketchup aftertaste. The dryness makes sense, it's jerky, of course it's going to be dry, but to have such a saucy aftertaste leave me so high and dry? In the end, I just didn't feel satisfied in either the burger or jerky departments.
I love burgers, and I love jerky, but when those two worlds combined I found myself left with a dry mouth that tastes like condiments, and a longing for either plain ol' jerky, or a big ol' burger, with neither to be had. This product is really well executed,and I would love to try the rest of their line, but it just isn't the product for me. (My fiance refused to try it, but I want the record to show that my dogs are going absolutely bananas begging for it.)
UPDATE: I left this bag of jerky in our snack-station, and yesterday I got a text from my fiance who can't stop eating it. He wouldn't say that he loves it, but said he just kept going back for more. Maybe I'll be re-buying this in the future after all...
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I remember there was a product that had jerky all chopped up finely and sold in round tins. That would been ideal to sprinkle on burgers before grilling for texture.
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