A Vegan Called Bacon

I felt quite smug the other day.  I made two fairly fancy meals in a single sprint of effort.

Lunch was quinoa (with some herbs stirred in);  roasted vegetables; puy lentils in a ground coriander & balsamic dressing; and a “yoghurt” of blended soft tofu, umeboshi paste and salt:

Dinner was the ingredients for lunch, mixed and layered with lasagne, baked with the yoghurt on top:

Gosh, was I pleased with myself. I love lazy food fiddles. It’s a trick akin to bin soup, only less soupy.

On a separate note, if anyone can show me a picture of vegan lasagne that actually looks appetising, I will write them a bad poem about their lasagne as a prize.

Just a quick post to share my latest obsession: a 10 minute, super-spicy lunchtime noodle dish, loosely based on Dan Dan Noodles.  I love spicy food, but the exciting insight (for me, at least) is the idea of putting sesame paste in noodles.

The sauce uses sichuan peppers, dried red chillis, tahini (sesame paste), and chilli oil. The type of chilli oil is a crucial detail. It should be dark red, with a thick layer of sediment:

It’s totally inauthentic because (a) I use green vegetables instead of meat; and (b) there appears to be some debate on the authenticity of sesame paste.  I took my inspiration from a recipe in Fushcia Dunlop’s wonderfully readable and fascinating gastro/travel book Shark’s Fin Soup and Sichuan Pepper, so I’m assuming it’s a least slightly authentic.

If you don’t like a punchy heat accompanied by a numbing sensation in your mouth, cut out the sichuan pepper and use one tablespoon of chilli oil - it’s still tasty.

Inauthentic Vegan Dan Dan Noodles

Ingredients

1tsp whole sichuan peppers
4 dried red chillis, snipped in half, seeds discarded
A handful of green veg, chopped small (I’ve used spring greens, french beans, cabbage..)
A packet of instant noodles, flavouring discarded
3 tbsp light soy sauce
2 tbsp chilli oil (with plenty of sediment)
1 tbsp tahini (sesame paste)

Method

Get the noodles boiling.

Heat 1tbsp oil in a wok on a medium-hot flame.  Throw in the sichuan peppers and let them sizzle.  Add the chillis, stir around briefly, then add the greens.  Stir fry for a minute or so.

Mix soy, chilli oil and tahini in a bowl.  Add some ground sichuan pepper if you like.

Drain the noodles.  Throw them in the wok with the greens.  Stir through the sauce.  Pour it all into your bowl.  Consume, and sweat.

I’m pleased that spring has started to gush green things at me, because it gives me a chance to do more foraging. In the field, I’m using Richard Mabey’s classic book Food for Free, which I now own in handy pocket format.

hawthorn

My foraging season started a couple of weeks ago with a hunt for Saint George’s Mushrooms, but it was too early, and the weather had been too dry. All I got was a handful of hawthorn leaves, which, according to Mr Mabey, are commonly called “bread and cheese”, and are “the first wild vegetable a country child eats”. Apparently Food for Free was written in the twentieth century, but I suspect this was in an alternate dimension. For the record, “bread and cheese” tastes like grass-flavoured parsley.

We’ve also had some very nice nettle soup, which led me to wonder how people collected it before gloves were invented.

The prettiest and tastiest stuff so far are ramsons (wild garlic), which were in full flower last week down by the river. It makes for a wonderful, radioactive green soup, and the flowers are a pretty addition.  However, making fritters with the flowers, as suggested on one website, seemed like a fairly pointless idea to me.

Kim is not quite as eager as me to eat wild food, mainly due to potential unwanted urine-related garnish. When picking blackberries as a child, my mum always used to advise us to “stay away from cocky height”, but unfortunately this sage wisdom is hard to follow with low, ground-covering perennials like ramsons.

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Phew - chapter one of the great seitan adventure is more-or-less complete. I wasn’t expecting it to be this difficult.  There’s so many possible variations.  I made thirty-four different varieties of sausage.  I ended up chewing and then spitting samples out like a wine buff, because even a gluten glutton like me couldn’t contemplate that much rubbery dough sat in my stomach.

I decided to focus on sausages for this part of the adventure.  I concentrated on the steaming-in-foil method, because it’s quick and easy, thus allowing for more variations in the same amout of time.

The starting point was Vegan Dad’s sausage recipe.  It came out as the most hilariously gross thing I have ever had the pleasure to cook:

I was so pleased that I posted the image to a thread “what’s your grossest food porn pic?” at the PPK forums.  My favourite response was:

“you win, dude. YOU. WIN.”

So anyway, in the following weeks, I steamed my way through a bewildering and message catalogue of sausage options.  I tried them mixed with mushrooms, apples, potato. I steamed them for 10 minutes, 30 minutes and 40 minutes. I wrapped them tight and I wrapped them loose.  I made them moist and sticky, and firm and powdery.  I ate them immediately and I left them overnight.

Here’s what I found:

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I like the Victorians. I like moustaches and pommade; malacca canes and locks of hair in brooches; candlesticks and napkin rings; claret decanters and fish knives.

my great-great-grandfather, plus crazy beard policy

There was an explosion of Victorian vegetarianism at end of the nineteenth century.  By 1910, London was awash with veggie restaurants, and could boast what was claimed to be “the largest vegetarian restaurant in the world”, equipped with “modem three-tier steamers capable of steaming … 350 cup puddings at one time”, and two ladies’ dining rooms where “as many as 250 business girls avail themselves of the advantage  of a vegetarian meal nearly every day”.

The Order of the Golden Age, a leading voice of vegetarianism during this period, was delighted in 1911 to be able to reprint an article from the Meat Trades Journal stating “vegetarianism is spreading across the country like some loathsome disease.”

I recently came across the Golden Age Cook Book, published in 1898, and packed with Victorian recipes such as “A Border Timbale Of Mock Chicken” and “Cucumber Jelly” (weirdly containing half a pound of gelatine). An irresistible opportunity to do culinary time travel.

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The other day, with my earnings from cooking at Dub and Grub, I bought myself a big new stack of cookery books.

One of my purchases was The Uncheese Cookbook. Like many vegans, I take obsessive delight in making obtuse veganisations of unlikely foods.  Cheese, of course, is one of the most difficult; there’s really nothing that approximates to the flavour of cheese (nutritional yeast doesn’t do it for me).  And as for making something with the right texture and stringy, gooey melting properties, forget it.

The cheese orgy, from my favourite Asterix book

But I like a challenge, and I fancied making something unusual for the Scottish Vegans potluck last weekend (which was great - check out the spread), so I tested a “brie”, a “swizz” cheese, a “gruyère” and a “boursin”.  It seems that the Uncheese Cookbook staple method is to suspend a variety of “creamy” things in agar.  Here they are:

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One of my half-baked cooking projects is to explore traditional Scottish dishes.  Ingredients-wise, this means root vegetables, oats, and animal products.  Lately, however, I’ve been thinking about the cooking methods.

It’s cold in the Highlands, and naturally people used to cook on an open fire which was constantly burning.  One-pot dishes like soups and stews, which could easily be re-heated, were convenient and tasty.  And baking was done on a completely flat, seasoned, iron plate, called a girdle (”griddle” in English).  There’s a picture of a traditional girdle in this description of traditional Highland “blackhouses”.

The simplicity of this way of cooking appeals to me.  According to the 14th century Chronicles of Sir John Froissart, a girdle and a bag of oats were standard issue army equipment:

Under the flaps of his saddle, each man carries a broad plate of metal; behind the saddle, a little bag of oatmeal: when they have eaten too much of the sodden flesh, and their stomach appears weak and empty, they place this plate over the fire, mix with water their oatmeal, and when the plate is heated, they put a little of the paste upon it, and make a thin cake, like a cracknel or biscuit, which they eat to warm their stomachs: In this manner the Scots entered England, destroying and burning every thing as they passed.

I don’t have anything nearly as interesting to say about these particular oatcakes, apart from they were very nice, and simple to make.  I couldn’t be bothered to do them all in my tiny frying pan (I’m on the lookout for a proper girdle), so I did them in the oven.  I suppose that if you cooked them on a girdle over an open fire, they would traditionally come out tasting of smoke.  Unlike mine, The Stripey Cat’s oatcakes include smoked paprika as an ingredient, an interesting idea that I’ll try next time.  Though if I’m really trying for authenticity, I should actually get a fire burning in the garden…

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The crazed glutenfest binge continues.  It’s making for some weird photographic material, which I always like.  (I think it might take a while to finish the project.  I’ve got through 3 kilos of gluten flour in two weeks.)

Yesterday’s chewy starch-frenzy took me to meatball territory and this pretty fine recipe from Felicity, which I made without the gram flour.

Today, inspired by The Stripey Cat, I thought I’d simultaneously finish the glutenous little nuggets off and give the credit crunch the bird, by using more or less a whole bottle of wine in a single dish.  Gravy, French style.

Formidable, it was.

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It was fish that turned me.  When I was about eight years old, my mum served up fish that had eyes and a tail.  For the first time, I realised that fish fingers were made out of the same things that eat and move and people own as pets.   It sparked a series of nightmares involving swallowing living, wriggling goldfish.  Luckily, I didn’t get nightmares about eating fingers.

(It took me a few more years to get my head round the linguistic tricks used to disguise other edible animals, and fully appreciate the link between pork and Pigs, beef and Cows, and so on.  I must have been a very literal child).

Ever since my fishy nightmares, I’ve had Fish Paranoia.  Especially in Thai restaurants, where my explanations of how I-don’t-eat-fish-sauce-and-it’s-really-important-and-please-write-it-down get met with a wholly unconvincing nod (”yeah, yeah, no fish, whatever”).  Then I’ll spend an hour forlornly pushing things around my plate, tasting fish in everything I put in my mouth (including water).  It’s strange that I don’t get meat-broth paranoia in the same way, considering I’ve probably ended up eating some every other time I eat in an omni restaurant.

But while we were in China and Japan last year, I learned to like the flavour of the sea.  In Japan, the liberal amounts of seaweed are only matched by liberal amounts of fish broth, fish flakes, and fish innards, which really foments fish paranoia.  But still, I persisted in eating seaweed.  In China, we ate mock fish a few times, which was usually gluten faux meat wrapped in seaweed:

In an effort to conquer the paranoia, I recently decided to veganise Cullen Skink.  I have a long-standing plan to veganise traditional Scottish foods.  So doing a traditional Scottish fish soup lets start my Scottish project off, and chase away that fish paranoia, all in one go.

It turns out to be really easy. Veganised, it’s basically onions and potatoes boiled in soy milk, with some flavourings. It tastes of smoke, with a hint of the sea. I’m not sure it’s for everyone, but it’s definitely a bit different.

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Good gluten meat is great.  In China they’ve been doing it for centuries (I’ve described elsewhere the variety we encountered there) .  My theory is that to really push the art of faux meat forward in the West, we need to learn and translate their knowledge on the subject. Bryanna Clark Grogan’s Authentic Chinese Cuisine (one of my favourite cook books) does a pretty good job, but there’s still a long way to go before this kind of silly, fun nonsense is possible:

The strangest faux meat I've ever seen: mock pigeon

Meanwhile, it seems to me that most progress in the art of cooking with gluten that I read about is largely won at random.  Steam it for 20 minutes or 40 minutes?  Bake it for 60 or 120 minutes?  At 300F or 375F?  Why?  I’m confused!

I’ve spent a while reviewing the most popular recipes online, and have compiled a list of possible variations based on these. It’s ambitious, but I want to find out what really makes a difference to the texture of that wonderful, wierd, chewy stuff we call seitan.  And in the process, I’ve gathered about a million different styles and opinions about making it.

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