I'm having a lot of trouble with taste and smell for a little bit now. I literally cannot tolerate the taste of poultry, most red meat, fish, or eggs. I ran across this product while looking for alternative protein sources and although I wouldn't say this tastes like the ground beef I used to know and love, this was perfectly tolerable and did not have any bizarre strong taste (not even that grassy bean or pea taste a lot of gluten free bean flours have). The texture was really good - this really does resemble the texture of medium-coarse ground beef. IMPORTANT: I do not believe this product is mostly intended to be consumed 'as-is'. I let it soak in a makeshift homemade Chinese food brown sauce (soy sauce, water, rice vinegar, sesame seed oil, tiny pinch of brown sugar, cayenne, mustard powder, ginger, paprika, black pepper, all-spice, salt) and thought this was pretty good and did sort of remind me of the taste of beef between these flavors. I haven't tried it in spagetti sauce yet, but expect my best results will be to flavor the meat as described above, deain it, then add to my sauce right before eating my portion. (Sorry, I know this sounds crazy - it has been a LONG year with taste issues, lol)