A Vegan Called Bacon

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.  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.

So, 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 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, cue cool 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.

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 (of all places), 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.  Roughly chopped onion, carrot and potato, in water, with an S&B curry cube dissolved in it.  Super simple, and apparently what 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 trialed frying breaded slabs of aubergine to replace the breaded pork that would traditionally be served with curry in Japan.  I did actually prefer, slightly, 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:

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.

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.