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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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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I was staring at the fridge at lunch the other day, and an aging broccoli and a tatty old cauliflower were staring back at me.  I was reminded of a soup we got in Hong Kong made of two sub-soups of contrasting colours, carefully poured into the bowl to make a Ying and Yang shape. 

A friend recently gave me a spare old hand blender, and anyway, chunky soup is so last month.  So I thought I’d make a blended, novelty patterned soup

It seemed a good idea to try for a very dark green bit, and a very light, white bit.  So, on the right, we have half a cauliflower, half an onion, half a celery stick, a small handful of cashews, and some salt.  In the green corner, a bizarre mixture of purple sprouting broccoli, onion, a bit of potato, some black mustard seeds, a bit of seaweed, some spinach, and some red peanuts (just because I’d put cashews in the white bit). And some stock.

I boiled them both for 20 minutes, and blended them both until they were really smooth.

The broccoli bit was nothing to get too excited about.  Despite all the strange ingredients, it just tasted of salty broccoli.  The cauliflower bit, though, was amazing.  It turned out thick – presumably thanks to the cashews – and tasted creamy and delicate and kind of cheesy.  In other words, it was basically a vegetable-flavoured, fat-free roux, so as a side experiment, I popped some into the oven to see how it would fair on the top of something like lasagne:

(I think I can safely say that this application of my newly discovered sauce needs more research)

Then came the really fun part.  I gave up on the Ying and Yang idea before I even started, and after a couple of experiments, for some reason I ended up making patterns that reminded me of kitsch 1970s curtains.  Because the white bit was thick and the green bit runny, it meant you could get some pretty interesting effects.

It reminds me of children’s birthday party food when I was very small – of Battenburg Cakes, Cheese and Pineapples on Cocktail Sticks, and Musical Chairs.  With the significant difference that when I was five, I think it’s very unlikely I would have gone anywhere near broccoli and cauliflower soup.

Since we moved to Glasgow, most of our cooking equipment has remained in storage, somewhere in darkest, suburban England. This includes piles of old magazines, records I’ve not listened to for ten years, and old pairs of shoes; but most importantly, it includes my trusty blender.

(I hate the fact that one day, all our crap will turn up in boxes at our flat, and we’ll have to face up to the reality of a lifetime of junk. Storage companies must make a fortune by collecting monthly fees from people in denial about their boxes of useless gewgaws.)

In my new, blenderless world, I have been shying away from soups. But now I have crossed over to the Chunky Side. Kim has been telling me for years that it’s better when it’s Chunky, but I’ve always ignored her, and whizzed away the little ragged cubes of potato and the mushy beans into a smooth, featureless monotony.

No longer!

Writing out a recipe for soup seems as useful as giving someone instructions on how to use a hand dryer. Cook vegetables, add stock, boil; what more do you need to know?

Still, I should make an effort. The picture at the top of this post is, obviously, Borsht. (Kim took a look at the photo and said, “looks like entrails”). I grated lots of fresh beetroot and some carrots, and also included tiny, diced pieces of butternut squash, and a little shredded cabbage. I might have put in a bit of apple, though I’m not sure. I dressed it up with cumin, a dash of vinegar, and a sprinkle of sugar.

The second photo is of potato and leek soup. I use one leek and three small potatoes per person. I slice the leeks into fairly thin rounds, and sweat them slowly in oil, in a covered pan. I make teeny-weeny diced potato, with the skin still on. I add stock and boil for a good 30 minutes. Then I take a potato masher and thicken it up, roughly. I’ve been doing that one at least once a week, lately. It’s about 10 minutes prep, cheap, and very, very tasty. And much better when it’s CHUNKY.

Finally, this one’s the beginning of a minestrone:

Lightly fried red onion and garlic, diced carrot, courgette, green beans, bell peppers (yellow and red), a handful of diced mushrooms, all sweated up so it looks like the picture. Follow up with a handful of roughly chopped fresh tomatoes, some tomato puree, and stock. Throw in some small pasta (I used penne, put it in a bag, and trampled upon it, delicately). Five minutes before the end, add plenty of chopped parsley and some bits of fresh basil. Lots of people put in some beans but I’m not too sure about that.

I forgot to take a picture of the Chunky results, but that picture there is quite full enough of Chunk. And what’s more, the shadow in the background is cool.

But now, unfortunately, I am going to have to face up to the storage reality. Eighty pounds a month is a hefty price to pay for the convenience of not having to look at my seventeen threadbare towels and thirty three pairs of holey socks. At least I’ll get my blender back, and will once again be able to make breadcrumbs.

At least some of my soups will stay Chunky, however.

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: