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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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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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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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)

The other day, Kim wanted “Something With Gravy” the other day for dinner. Her great-aunt Vera calls this kind of comfort food a “Brown Dinner”, a name which we find particularly appealing.

Our usual Brown Dinner is some shop-bought vegan sausages with mash and home-made mushroom gravy. However, the only meaty (read: excuse for gravy) thing in the house was some old TVP chunks. So I rehydrated some shiitake mushrooms, and rehydrated the soy chunks in the leftover mushroom water plus some vegetable bouillon powder. I fried up some onions, the shiitake mushrooms, then the TVP. I added some left-over broth, and threw in some peas and chopped tomatoes. I seasoned it with soy sauce and sesame oil, thickened it with some corn flour, and served it in the middle of a nest of mash. It wasn’t bad.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. The secondary point of this post is that when I got the leftovers out the following day, I realised that we had been eating something that looked, and even smelled, like dog food:

The primary point of this post is: look how much nicer it looks on some instant noodles, drizzled with chilli sauce, and sprinkled with sesame seeds.

It looks like dog food on noodles, drizzled with chilli sauce, and sprinkled with sesame seeds, which I think is a whole lot nicer:

I’m going to investigate more instant noodle topping ideas. It made for a proper good meal.

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:

As our time in China is coming to an end, I thought it was time to list some of tasty or bizarre varieties of mock meat we’ve encountered. I’ve been following the Mocking of Meat at Hezbollah Tofu and can’t wait till I get a chance to do some serious seitanising like this wicked-looking roulade.

´Ribs´, when done well, are delicious. They need to be marinated properly in a really savoury sauce. We preferred ones with edible ´bones´ to those with bones made of wood. Why do I want a mouthful or thick toothpicks?

One of our favourite dishes was ´beef in XO sauce´. No picture, annoyingly. It was strips of seitan deep fried to a crispy/chewy texture, in a delicious sweet/savoury sauce. We had this, and the ribs pictured above, at Pure Lotus in Yangshuo (check out the photos of their food on their website).

An old favourite, and the only one to be found with any regularity in the UK, is mock duck. What´s entertaining here, though, is that sometimes it´s been molded so that it supposedly actually looks like a duck. This one´s from Beihe Restaurant in Beijing. I got the parson’s nose. (Which I just found out is properly called a pygostyle. Mock Pygostyle! Yeah!)

Beijingers are obsessed with ´meat-on-a-stick´, or chuan´r. Tiny chunks of lamb (or stranger meats like a pig´s pizzle) are pierced with a stick, painted with a cumin-chilli mix, and roasted over what appears to be actual lumps of coal. For ages I couldn´t work out what the signs were that looked like this: 串. Then I realised they were pictures of meat-on-a-stick. It took me a couple more weeks to find out that the actual Chinese character for chuan´r is 串.

Anyway, we´ve had it a couple of times, including tofu-in-a-stick or broccoli-on-a-stick variants, but the best meaty one was in a Vegan Yuanqi Restaurant in Urumqi:

Another favourite dish, which also scores high on the ´wierd´ front, was Bodhi-Sake´s pork belly (and I propose to try emulating some real pork belly dishes back at home):

Surprisingly common, yet not-particularly-pleasant, is mock whelk:

We´ve had two much better ´seafood´ dishes: mock fish, and mock cuttlefish. This mock fish was from Pure Lotus in Beijing, and was one of our favourites:

The mock cuttlefish pictured next was from Hong Kong. Mock cuttlefish? I absolutely lack the experience to just its mock accuracy (mockuracy?), but it was pleasantly chewy strips something rice-based, somehow made to go curly, and fried with a crisy, salty coating.

The single most bizarre fishy discovery was mock sea cucumber in Bodhi-Sake, Beijing. A vegetable which is made in the form of a fish which is named after a vegetable. And, what’s more, a fish which looks like a knobbly poo. It didn´t taste of much (maybe like the real thing? I have no idea). But it looked pretty cool.

I think my least favourite mock meat is mock prawns. We´ve had them a couple of times. They are made of some kind of very firm material, molded into prawn shapes, and flavoured like prawns. Most mock meats taste interesting and natural, and stand in their own right as interesting ingredients. These prawns tasted completely artificial, a mockery of mock meat. They are the pink things in the hotpot platter below:

Update: No, James: sadly, on this trip, we are yet to find a decent mock ortolan.

Update 2: Since I wrote this we went back to Beijing one last time, where I witnessed perhaps the wierdest ersatz buchery yet: mock pidgeon

When we were in Yangshuo we used to hang out at this guy’s shop, eating tasty greasy fried noodles for nearly no money. I never really thought of fried noodles as a meal before we started scoffing the lot here.

The basic ingredients are garlic, ginger, chilli paste, fried in a bit of oil. Then add the secret ingredient: chopped Sichuan Pickled Greens (su cai) or a similar pickled packet vegetable. They sell them in Chinese supermarkets at home. Sichuan Greens are nice in any vegetable dish. Here’s two types of pickeld veggies - the first are some kind of green bean, the second are classic Sichuan greens.

Actually, he had some other secret ingredients, which I think were MSG and sugar, but my version tastes OK without.

Just soak flat rice noodles for the appropriate amount of time. Then heat up a little oil in a wok. Throw in chopped dried chillies or chilli/garlic paste, chopped ginger, and garlic. Sizzle. Add chopped pickled greens and chopped real greens (e.g. yellow flowering broccoli, finely chopped), and any other finely chopped veggies you fancy. Chuck in the noodles. Fry. Add a glug of light soy sauce and a small splash of sesame oil.

The end. It’s very nice. This one also included some fried, pressed tofu, and some coriander:

Another good outcome of my tofu binge: I discovered I like Chinese five spice seasoning. Normally I think it makes everything taste of cinnamon. I think this stems from a bad spice experience as a kid. My mum had a mysterious and exotic-looking spice collection which came out occasionally, like when she was baking a Christmas cake. I found out that a spoonful of cinnamon tastes like shit. I think this has tainted all cinnamon experiences since then, in the same way that drinking a whole bottle of Ouzo as a teenager causes the smell of aniseed to make you feel sick for the rest of your life.

But this was dead easy and I really liked it as a snack. The type of tofu was bai yu, firm-white tofu. It looked like this:

All I did was cut it into triangles, and ‘marinade’ it in a bowl of powder consisting of 1 part Five spice, 1 part salt, 2 parts sugar, some garlic, and some white pepper. I rubbed the powder all over the pieces and left it for an hour or so. Then I deep(ish) fried it in an inch of very hot oil, turning it over until it looked lovely and brown and crispy.

It tasted super-savoury, which is my thing. The outside was crisp, the inside satisfyingly firm. And the five spice wasn’t much like cinnamon at all. Probably because I’d nuked it by frying it to death.

 

 

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.