A Vegan Called Bacon

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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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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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:

When we stayed with our friends in Okinawa, Japan, I wanted to cook them a meal. I’d seen pumpkins everywhere, which reminded me of a wonderful stew we had at Brown’s Field (of which more in a later post).

But while we were shopping I saw gyoza wrappers. For a while now I’ve been thinking that the potential for unusual fillings in these delicious little parcels as been criminally under-explored. As everyone knows, Elvis was a big fan of fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches. It just came to me as if in a dream as I stood in front of the refrigerated pastry selection: why not replace the toast with gyoza wrappers and fry them instead? I am proud to announce that my latest gyoza innovation, Elvis dumplings, was a great success.

They were very simple to make. 1) Buy jiaozi/gyoza wrappers. (2) Mash a banana. (3) put a small blob of peanut butter and a small blob of banana in a wrapper, and fold into a dumping (my friend Diana has already put online the best explanation I’ve seen on how to do this. You can use water instead of egg for sticking the edges together). (4) Cook them pot-sticker style. (5) Eat and be happy.,

I love pot-stickers - dumplings which have been fried rather than boiled. To cook place them carefully in a thin layer of fairly hot oil in a large pan or flat-bottomed wok, and fry them for maybe 5 minutes. The aim is to get a lovely, crispy, brown surface on the bottom sides. When they all have golden-brown bottoms, pour in some water (say half a mug) and cover quickly (watching out for spitting oil). The cooking is completed by steaming the dumpings in the pan, until the water has all evaporated or been absorbed.

Incidentally, at the same time, I made a savoury filling of shiitake mushrooms, red cabbage, green onions, pine nuts, ginger and garlic, very finely chopped and seasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil. It was a good filling. What I liked most was the red of the cabbage showing through the dumping wrapper. I’m planning on trying other colourful fillings in the future. Any ideas? Blueberries? Beetroot? They’s all purple/red though. I need more colours. And flavours. I’m thinking tomato and marmite; chilli and tea; curried potato (we’re talking mini samosas here); whiskey and ginger.

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.