A Vegan Called Bacon

How fair and how pleasant art thou, O Marmite, for delights:

I can’t imagine life without Marmite. When I was away from the UK for a year, I took enough supplies of Marmite to last me the whole time.  Marmite is a peculiarly British shibboleth.  I’d produce it at breakfast, people would ask what it was, I would give them a taste, and usually, they would recoil in horror.

For the uninitiated: Marmite is dark, dark brown; sticky like treacle; and tastes mainly of salt, with spices and yeastiness thrown in.  It’s also full of Vitamin B12, that Achilles Heel of vegan nutrition.

Here’s what I consider the correct way of eating Marmite:

• Bread selection.  Either a fairly thinly sliced, nutty brown bread, or a thickly sliced, fresh white loaf.
• Toasting.  The level of browning needs to be moderately high, to a medium leather colour.  We want the toast to be crispy on the outside, but still a little moist on the inside.
  
• Initial cooling.  Wait for about 10 seconds before you start spreading, holding the toast vertically so that it doesn’t accumulate moisture as the steam from the toast condenses on a plate.  We wait a short while to ensure that some of the butter doesn’t melt.
• Buttering.  Fairly generous amounts of your favourite vegan butter substitute.  Allow the butter to melt with the toast still held away from the plate.  We want plenty of grease to melt into the toast, but we want some of it to remain on the surface, where it will mix with the Marmite.  I usually have it like this, but it’s also good with a more generous amount of spread:
  
• Marmite application.  I prefer a generous hazelnut-sized knob of Marmite, spread evenly across the toast.  However, many people prefer about half this amount.
• Consumption.  The cooling process should not have advanced too far.  The toast should still be warm.  Eat fairly quickly, but savouring every mouthful.

The taste experience of Marmite is an intense journey.  I propose a standard Six Step Marmite Tasting Model for appreciating the process:

1. Insertion into mouth.  Before you bite it, you should feel the roughness of the bottom surface of the toast on your tongue. 
2. First bite. The bite should be crispy. 
3. Initial mastication.  The first chew should release warm "butter" in a gentle burst, with a hint of Marmite.  As the three ingredients blend in your mouth, the salty and spicy flavours of the Marmite taste dominate, providing the initial intense flavour burst that deters so many initiates. 
4. Pre-swallow.  Towards the end of the mouthful, the Marmite and spread tastes fade and the wheaty, yeastiness of the toasted bread dominates. 
5. Swallow. The bolus that has formed in your mouth should ideally still have a definite rough texture, which pleasantly and gently tickles the back of your throat as it passes.
6. Finish. The finish, which can last a good 20 minutes, is once again led by the Marmite, which has lost it saltiness and provides a lingering, yeasty taste with notes of celery, cloves, and tamarind.

Now I’m going to make another slice.

(marmite jar picture courtesy of ajbeanster)

I just love the idea of going all scientific about cooking. That’s why I did a comparative table of Chinese cheese a few months ago, and why I tried making mapo tofu without boiling the tofu first. I don’t really know why; I just think it’s kind of cool. You know, like, cool to do comparative cooking experiments with vegan ingredients. This is the kind of reason I never used to get Valentines cards at school.

My very good friends at Mungo’s Hifi Sound System have been doing a night called Dub and Grub in Glasgow for the past seven years. They take over a pub venue, play dub music, and cook a set meal for super cheap (£8 for three courses). And it’s completely vegan: partly because of the dub reggae / Rastafarian / vegan connection, but mainly because they play in a vegan pub (The 78, which was recently listed in the top ten veggie restaurants in the country).

Now we’ve moved to Glasgow, I’ve been helping out with Dub and Grub, and last week got to help design a menu. You have to be prepared to make 100 mains, maybe 30 starters, and 30 desserts. Cooking for that many people means your mistakes get amplified, so you need to be sure you’ve got the recipe right. So, the day before, I launched myself into obsessive, girl-repelling experiments.

For the starter, I wanted to do vegetable tempura. I’d been amazed when we went to Japan by how easy it was to make. Our friend Seiko made a batter which contained only flour and water, and said the most important thing was to keep the batter cold (which she did by floating ice cubes in it). But other recipes variously call for baking soda, beer, soda water, and corn flour.

Because I’ve got more experiments to write about, I’ll skip the tables and jump to the conclusion. It does matter about the temperature of the water; if you have a warm batter, the tempura tastes a little burned. Corn flour doesn’t make a noticeable difference, but fizzy stuff does: still-fizzing beer and/or a small spoon of baking soda both make bubbles in the batter as it fries, making it lighter and crispier. The one on the left is with water, the one on the right is with beer. You can really see the difference.

The next experiment was the curry. For years we have been making a Japanese curry taught us by Taka, a fellow student when Kim was at university. It’s astonishingly tasty for something so simple. Simply fry up roughly chopped onion (maybe letting it brown a little); add equal amounts of potato and carrot in large chunks; nearly cover them in water with a few good dashes of soy sauce; add a drop of sesame oil and sugar to taste. Boil until slightly mushy.

Then, in Hong Kong, we had an amazing home-style Japanese curry which was richer and spicier than Taka’s curry. Trying to recreate it when we got home, I found that the secret ingredient is S&B Golden Curry Sauce. It’s simply roughly chopped onion, carrot and potato, in water, with an S&B curry cube dissolved in it. Super simple, and what nearly everyone in Japan does – even, apparently, chefs. But it resembles cheating, and what’s more, S&B curry cubes are 50p per person; a silly amount to spend when you’re mass catering on a budget.

So, my next experiment was a three-way face-off between Taka’s curry, an S&B curry, and my own attempt to recreate that elusive S&B flavour using only my wits and an internet search engine for inspiration. Here’s the showdown in action:

I was pleased that my own curry worked. I also trialled frying breaded slabs of aubergine to replace the breaded pork that would traditionally be served with curry in Japan. I did slightly prefer the S&B version, and it is super-simple (Vegan Lunch Box blogged the cube method recently). But I had used a packet curry powder, and decided that I could do better with my own spices and some inspiration from Justhungry.

Making it all for Dub & Grub on the day was an adrenaline rollercoaster. My recipe included a whole load of apples and bananas to provide the sweetness (instead of sugar), and for a while it was touch and go if it would taste like a weird, sickly stew; but it all came together in the end. We prepared as much as possible in advance, such as this vast stack of breaded aubergine slices:

In the event, it rained slabs of icy water for a couple of hours before Dub & Grub, so the place was pretty quiet; we only sold about 50 covers, which was disappointing. On the other hand, we got a whole load of enthusiastic feedback, with superlatives and happy faces filtering through the serving hatch. So I was really happy, and would love to do it again. So, if you have any suggestions for future Dub and Grub meals (3 courses, tasty, doable in quantity, on a budget), I would love your inspiration.

Here’s the recipe:

Japanese Katsu Curry (serves 100)

For the stew:

• 15 large cooking apples, peeled and cut into chunks
• 10 large bananas, peeled and cut into chunks
• 5 litres of weak stock
• 25 large onions
• 40 medium potatos
• 40 medium carrots
• 1 bottle brown sauce
• 350ml light soy sauce
• 3 cups of potato starch
• 4 tablespoons ground turmeric
• 4 tablespoons ground coriander
• 2.5 tablespoons ground cumin
• 2 tsp ground cardamon
• 1 tsp ground black pepper
• 1 tsp chilli powder
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves
• 1/2 tsp ground fennel

For the breaded aubergines:

• 25 aubergines, cut into 1/2” slices crossways
• 150g plain white flour
• salt to taste
• 6 x 250g bags of Japanese Panko (breadcrumbs)

To prepare:

1. Boil the apples and bananas in the stock until mushy
2. Blend them together with the brown sauce, soy sauce, potato starch, spices. Add more sugar to taste if necessary (this is supposed to be a salty/sweet curry).
3. In a separate pan, fry the onion, then get the potato and carrot sweating
4. Add the curry sauce and continue to cook until the veg are soft
5. Make a batter by whisking water into the flour and salt until it’s just runny
6. Dip aubergine slices in the batter and then into breadcrumbs; press the breadcrumbs onto the slices
7. Deep fry the slices until golden brown
8. Serve with Japanese rice, with plenty of curry sauce all over both the rice and the aubergine slices

Bonus picture:

The bottom of the curry pan was satisfyingly encrusted after a few hours of keeping the curry hot:

In June, we spent abut 10 days in Xinjiang, the wild west of China. The indigenous population here is Uighur. They speak Uighur, are Muslim, and have facial hair on their upper lips (the men, at least). Nothing here is what an outsider would identify as Chinese (unless you count the roads, buildings, shops and food brought into the cities by the Chinese immigration policy).

Food-wise, we were quite worried. We had heard that it’s meat meat meat in Xinjiang. First impressions confirmed this. The most popular snack is chuan’r: spicy mutton kebabs cooked in the street.

But in the end, we did pretty well. To start with, we located the nan bread for which the region is famous. Street bakers dot the Uighur neighbourhoods in two-person teams, one kneading and rolling out pizza-shaped dough, the other shaping it on a convex surface with a thick crust, impressing a pattern of rings with a spikey tool, dabbing the surface into a mixture of minced onion and cumin seeds, and then sticking it to the wall of a tandoor-style oven to bake.

They sell huge piles of these in the mornings. When it’s fresh and warm, the bread is absolutely delicious. it quickly goes hard (and keeps for days). When it’s crispy, it’s less nice on its own, but goes well with juicy fillings like flavoured tofu from Chinese stores. Some stalls also sold vegan corn breads. It was so nice to have “proper” bread again (i.e. not the sweet, dry, cakelike stuff you get in Chinese bakeries).

Other dry street goods stood out as vegan. Xinjiang is famous for its fruit, and Uighur areas are covered in dried fruit stands, selling up to eight varieties of amazing raisins like nothing you get at home, plus strange but delicious dried tomatoes, figs, plums, apricots, almonds, walnuts…. more than I got to try. Roasted pulses are also common. Once, a bus stopped on a highway for a toilet stop right next to a stand selling at least 15 varieties of roasted pulses: all of which I had never seen before.

In Kashgar, we had one of our favourite meals in a long, long time. Kahsgar is on the Karakoram Highway to Pakistan, and we found a Pakistani street restaurant which cooked us a simple, homestyle meal of channa dahl and a green leafy vegetable. It was amazing.

We also did really well in Urumqi, where there was a fantastic vegan Chinese restaurant called Yuanqi, which did fantastic jiaozi and chuan’r.

However, it seemed a shame not to be able to sample proper Uighur food. So we found a tourist office and got them to write down what we do and don’t eat in Uighur, and we started using it at restaurants and street stands.

In the end we were able to eat three types of authentically Uighur food: pancakes, konjac noodles, and laghman noodles.

Laghman noodles are hand-pulled, doughy noodles, much like you get in other parts of China, but with a rich, tomato and vegetable sauce. I assume the standard version has some meat slipped in, but we succeeded in getting a veggie option. It tasted really quite Italian to me. Pictured is a version we got with small, square noodles, which made it seem even more Italian. It came with delicious rose tea.

The Konjac noodles are also very common. You see vendors in street markets slicing thick noodles off a large, jelly-like block with a big knife. They are served cold, with a range of magic sauces (vinegar, soy, broth, etc) poured on top, and a topping of raw garlic and lots of chilli. A very strong flavour which I loved but which does your breath no favours. I was a little dubious about some of the magic sauces but I took a long time explaining my food choices and they assured me it was OK.

The highlight for me, though, was the pancakes. I first saw them in the Wusi Night Market, an amazing weekend spectacle of lights and fire and smoke and smells in Urumqi. There were two types: one fried in a lot of oil, and one cold. The fried one contained egg, but the other one (xiàn bǐng xiÇŽo cài – pancake with pickle stuffing) was OK. What really excited me, though, was the fillings. About 15 different bowls of salads and pickles. Strips of marinaded tofu. Pickled cabbage. Lightly fried, finely chopped mushroom. Beansprouts with garlic and nuts. You point at what you want and they roll them all into a delicious little package for you. I found variations elsewhere, often with meat, but usually with the option to have no meat. Another delicious one contained a green leafy vegetable, strips of tofu, and some spicey flavourings, squeezed between two thin pancakes, sealed at the edges with water, and then dry fried, rolled, and sliced. Like a Xinjiang pop tart, or something. Serve with icy, dirt-cheap beer.

One of the types of tofu I bought was tofu rolls. I wasn´t sure what to do with them. Turns out I did something completely inappropriate with them.

For lunch one day in a restaurant, I had a nice, spicy dish of thin strips of tofu (which I later learned was called doufu si, and is a very common salad-type dish), but all I could remember about it was that it was spicy. So, I thought I´d make a Gonbao Tofu dish by slicing the rolls lengthwise and stir frying them in a gonbao sauce.

I was wrong in a few ways, it seems. First, the rolls are meant to be eaten as rolls. Slicing them thinly in strips and then laboriously unpeeling the resulting thin spirals into strips is a complete waste of time, because it turns out you can buy ready-made strips. Second, they are really meant to be eaten cold, as a salad. If you stir-fry them, they go far too crispy, very quickly (I did manage to get them just a little crispy, and it was OK). Third, the traditional flavouring for doufu si isn´t gonbao, but a light dressing of ground sichuan pepper, a sprinking of chilli, some fresh coriander, and some fennel seeds.

Still, it tasted OK, and gave me a chance to learn how to make a better gonbao sauce. Gonbao is a vinegar-and-sugar based sauce, stirred in at the end with peanuts. The first time round I wasn´t bold enough with really laying on the flavouring. So the second time round, I used a firmer, chunkier tofu, and a really decent amount of gonbao sauce. It worked much better.

Gonbao sauce should consist of two big glugs of black Chinese vinegar; one-and-a-bit glugs of a mixture of light and dark soy sauce; a couple of teaspoons of sugar (a quantity enough to match the vinegar); a dribble of sesame oil; and a small amout of water (or stock). You then stir in maybe a teaspoon of corn or potato starch to thicken it up a bit, remembering to stir it again just before you pour it into the stir fry. The peanuts should be the roasted, unsalted, still-in-their-red-shells variety.

The stir-fry should start with chillis and Sichuan peppers, continue with plenty of garlic and ginger, and then include your ´meat´ substitute, and some very finely diced or small vegetables such as carrot and/or peas. Don´t forget some spring onions (scallions) towards the end, again finely chopped.

 

The tofu I ended up using wasn´t something I got the name of, but it was a marinated/five-spice flavoured type, which appeared to have been both deep fried and compressed. It had a great texture for this kind of recipe.

So, a good excursion into two more types of tofu, though I felt a bit silly unwinding perfectly good rolls into strings.

 

My tofu eating marathon continues with an intrepid expedition into the world of Fermented Tofu. This is tofu which has been injected with bacteria and left to fester, just like cheese. Apparently it is very good for you… anti-mutagenic, in fact, which maybe means it acts as a shield against death rays.

Generally, people call it “stinky tofu”. I’ve seen it called “Chinese Cheese”, and there is definitely something cheesey about it. Most of the stuff is called furu in Mandarin, which appears literally to mean something like “spoiled milk”, and is generally translated as “fermented tofu”.

Here’s the ones I bought, with samples laid in front:

The jars, from left to right, are “Spicy Furu in Hemp Oil”, “Fetid Tofu”, “Big Chunks of Furu“, and “White Furu in Hemp Oil”. Read the chunks left-to-right, top-to-bottom.

I tried them with some trepidation. The results:

Conclusion: I’ll use furu again. The ones in hemp oil were very cheesey.

I think I will never touch the fetid stuff ever again, anti-mutagenic or not. Here’s a close up.

Mapo Doufu (Pockmarked Old Woman’s Tofu) is one of the most popular tofu dishes in China. Its traditional flavours are tofu, fried ground pork, mala, and doubanjiang (Sichaun Bean Paste).

You basically fry the ground pork so it’s a bit crispy, and set it aside; fry the bean paste in oil for 30 seconds, along with some extra chillies and sichuan pepper; then add some stock and boil chunks of soft tofu in that, with some scallions or leeks. Add the pork back in, and finish by thickening it with some potato or corn starch.

I encountered several challenges in preparing this. I didn’t have any vegetable stock, which doesn’t appear to exist in China (only pork, chicken and beef stocks), so I used Marmite (which travels with me everywhere, of course). I couldn’t find doubanjiang, so I used a red bean chilli garlic paste, which you can find everywhere.

Talking with a meaty person, they said the pork is a pretty important part of the dish. They told me it adds a slightly crunchy, chewy texture, and a slightly smoky flavour. I got excited in a tofu geek kind of way when I realised I could try substituting ground smoked tofu (doufu xun yu, “firm smoked tofu”) for ground pork. It meant I could use two types of tofu in one dish and make a good start to my tofu marathon.

The soft tofu was yellowish and smelled of egg. I took a nibble and it tasted of egg too. I looked up the Chinese characters on the label. Egg tofu. Shit. I ran to the market next door and found an old guy selling tons of fresh tofu products. It seems that tofu made that very morning is a delicious thing. It wobbled enticingly on the plate and smelled very delicate and moreish. I need to find a fresh tofu seller when I get home. And it cost 10p.

All mapo doufu recipes I’ve seen call for you to boil the tofu chunks in salted water before continuing. I tried this and kept some other chunks aside for comparison. I have no idea what boiling is meant to do, but the flavour and texture of the boiled and unboiled versions was the same. If anything, the unboiled one tasted better.

Next up, making the “pork”. I chopped the smoked tofu into tiny cubes and then mashed them with the back of a fork. I gues you could use a blender or a big pestle and mortar to do the same thing. It looked like this (that’s Beijing in the background):

Then I fried it in very hot peanut oil for a few minutes until browned and a bit crispy, while still being chewy.

Finally, I just followed the recipe… frying the spicy stuff and the paste, boiling the tofu with “stock” and some onion-type things, stirring in the “pork” and some thickener at the end. You have to stir it very carefully or the tofu gets mushed up.

End result: a pretty tasty dish. I needed to adjust the flavours at the end by adding a bit of Chinese “sherry”, because it wasn’t rich enough. I think if I’d used a decent stock it would have been fine without. I also need to find a better chilli paste, preferably proper doubanjiang. The one I used was quite salty so I held back on it, meaning the dish wasn’t as spicy as I’d have liked. I also used ground Sichuan Pepper which doesn’t have so much flavour, so my mouth hardly got numb at all. But I think for most people who just like “normal” spicy, it would have been just right.

Plus, I think the “pork” worked a treat. My first point on the texture scoreboard.

Sichuan people are very proud. They speak a crazy dialect and insist it’s the right way of speaking Chinese. And they do the best line in spicy food I think I’ve ever found. Super hot, but also with a crazy numb sensation. It makes your mouth feel like a big fleshy balloon has just landed in it. I was convinced it was some kind of terrible artificial chemical and was horrified when I first tasted it.

It turns out to be a flavour called “ma” which means “numb”. Most spicy things in Sichuan are actually “mala”, numb-spicy. The source of this flavour is a spice that looks like a red peppercorn. In English, it is called Sichuan Pepper but you often see it labeled Chinese Prickly Ash. In Chinese it’s called hua jiao and it’s something of a food craze here. You get it in instant noodles and all sorts.

Wierdly, once I knew it was natural and traditional, I suddenly developed a craving for it. And now I’m kind of addicted. Something which is both ma and la has something special about it. Chilli makes me feel high. Mala makes me feel delirious.

You can buy it as whole peppercorns, or ready-ground. I’ve found the ground ones are a bit shit and tasteless. The best result I’ve had so far is hot-frying a teaspoon or three in a generous bit of peanut oil in the bottom of a wok (along with a huge amount of dried chillis) before continuing with the meal. In soupy dishes, you can pour on extra mala oil in at the end for that extra kick, and oily sheen.

The other secret is that Sichuan recipes often call for a small amount of sugar. I’ve found the more firey-hot-numb a dish, the more the sugar balances the flavours.

Here in China it’s the last day of a 3 days mourning period for the victims of the Sichuan earthquake.

I’ve found it hard to know exactly what’s an appropriate response. It all seems very distant, something you watch on TV. I do know I find reports combining news of pandas with news of tens of thousands dead a bit inappropriate. Most people have given money, because it’s the only thing any of us can really do to help. Around Beijing, we’ve seen individuals lighting candles and sending them off in paper boats across city lakes. And in what seems to me to be a strange move, the government has decided to shut down all TV entertainment and websites. While, in fairness, their response does seem to have been overall excellent (compared to other governments in other disasters), they can’t resist their instinct to make political capital out of it.

So in the spirit of not knowing what’s appropriate, I thought I’d plough ahead and talk about a new favourite ingredient and act like that’s completely appropriate. If you’d like do donate something, I went for this children’s appeal by Half the Sky, or there’s always the Red Cross of Society China.