Food Critics Get First Taste of Burger Grown from Cow Stem Cells [VIDEO]

Scientists hoping to convince the world that there is a more sustainable way to eat meat grew beef from cow stem cells in a laboratory, and during a high-profile taste test Monday, food experts delivered some of the first reports of how the man-made meat tastes.

A lab-grown burger was grilled in front of reporters and tasted by the Chicago-based food writer Josh Schonwald and Austrian food critic Hanni Rutzler.

Schonwald said the lab-grown burger, which took about $330,000 to develop over the course of several years, "wasn't unpleasant." Rutzler said it had "intense" flavor.

"The surface of the meat was crunchy -- surprisingly," Rutzler said. "The taste itself was as juicy as meat can be, but different. It tastes like meat, not a meat-substitute like soya or whatever."

"I was expecting the texture to be more soft... there is quite some intense taste; it's close to meat, but it's not that juicy. The consistency is perfect, but I miss salt and pepper."

She added: "This is meat to me. It's not falling apart."

Schonwald said the burger's "mouthfeel" is like meat, but added, "I miss the fat, there's a leanness to it, but the general bite feels like a hamburger."

Research for the project was financed in part by a $330,000 donation from Google co-founder and entrepreneur Sergey Brin, according to NBC News.

Mark Post, a vascular biologist at Maastricht University in The Netherlands who led the research in developing the synthetic meat, said in an interview with NBC News that the burger is still a work in progress but that he's happy with the work so far.

"It tastes like beef. It's not quite there yet. But it is a very good start to improve afterward," he said.

He added that the research team achieved its primary goal of providing an alternative solution to meat production, which consumes vast amounts of resources and as an industry plays a significant role in environmental pollution. Growing meat in a lab, once costs stabilize, could also be an answer to questions of ethics and sustainability surrounding current meat industry standards.

"It can be done," he said. "We have now proven that we can grow meat outside the body of the cow using the same cells and using regular culture principles that we have took from the medical field."

To prepare the burger, Post and his colleagues took cultured muscle cells from a cow and combined them with bread crumbs, eggs and seasoning. The meat, naturally white in color, was made to look more appealing with the addition of beet juice and saffron.

"I would say it is somewhere on the spectrum between a Boca Burger [soy burger brand] and McDonald's," the food writer Schonwald added. "The absence of fat makes a big difference. It has the texture, which I was not expecting. It was like an animal-protein cake."

While the initial goal of the project was simply to see if creating meat in the lab could be done, Post said next steps will include refining the burger's taste and bringing the cost down.

"Of course it's our goal to provide an alternative solution to meat production right now and to be able to produce meat in an and ethical and environmentally friendly," Post said. "We are pretty positive that we can also make this cost effective once we scale it up and improve the techniques further."

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