A Vegan Called Bacon

Hooray, mushroom season.  I absolutely love searching out the little blighters.  It’s like a gladiatorial content ‘twixt man and fungus.  I just know they are hiding from me.  The tasty ones (like chanterelles) send out their inedible friends (russulas, usually… that’s the slimy red or yellow ones) as decoys.  But I get them in the end. Hunting, vegan style.

Plus, you get the thrill of sometimes deciding, for a change, to select some ones you haven’t eaten before, and to try eating those, and seeing if you die or not.  For example, the other day, I picked a few Amethyst Deceivers.  And if that’s not a name to make you think maybe they’re inedible, I don’t know what is.  (Apart from “Destroying Angel”, I suppose).  Just take a look at them, they’re purple for god’s sake:

They were pretty tasty, in the end.  A nice firm texture, and a bit nutty.  

So, whenever I find a new and interesting-looking mushroom, I take photos or a specimen and identify it. And then forget what it was called. The other day I found a new way of remembering them. Here’s what you do:

• Go picking with children, including an 11 month boy.  (Remembering to give all the children lots of lessons and reminders about not touching a mushroom unless an adult says it’s OK)
• Find an interesting new specimen and pocket it, separately from the edible ones
• Go home.  Have a beer and cook dinner.  Get hot and leave your jacket on the floor.
• Have the baby boy remind you that the mushroom was in your pocket by seeing him with it in his mouth
• Become numbed with dread.  Spend 2 hours positively identifying the mushroom and feeling like a dangerous fool

And it turns out it’s not toxic.  Probably.  Very much.

We’ve also enjoyed some shaggy ink caps, hedgehog mushrooms, ceps, and some chanterelles:

If you’ve not gone shrooming before, the only decent way to start is by going with an expert.  In the UK, at least, it’s pretty easy to find Fungi Forays led by obsessive professors in old woodland areas, during the season.  As for cooking them, I think it’s a shame to shroud the interesting flavours that you’ve spent so long hunting down.  I prefer to fry them up in a neutral-flavoured oil, with only a small bit of garlic (if you really must) and maybe a splash of white wine.  And salt and pepper, of course.  And if you can cook them outside, all the better for that wild-man-or-woman-of-the-woods vibe.

In my quest for chewy, I have found a couple of interesting textures.  Pork belly, and calamari.  We reckon they’re made from rice.  So I bought some “rice cakes” and experimented.  Here’s a quick writeup of the experiment, for the record.

We start with the raw ingredients: hard, waxy squares.  Pretty unappetising.

We continue by cooking them in the three ways outlined on the back of the packet.  First, just boil them.  Second, stir fry them, then steam them in a little water in the wok.  Third, boil them in a little water, let it boil away, then fry them.  Here’s what all three look like in the end:

The ones at the back were boiled-then-fried.  They were OK I suppose.  Basically tasted like fat, which is all right in my book.  More or less large, flat, crunchy croutons.  They had a nice colour, though.

The ones in the middle were fried-then-steamed.  They came out kind of grey.  They were chewy in a cardboardy kind of way.  No thanks.

The white ones were the ones that were simply boiled.  They tasted of nothing much.  A little like rice, not surprisingly.  The texture, however, was kind of interesting, as it was pleasantly chewy.

To conclude the experiment: largely, a pointless ingredient.  But I think I might try using the boiled version in a dish that calls for chewy seafood. 

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.

Today I read a frustrated rant about preachy vegans. I like unpreachy vegans. I want to be one. When you are ethically pure, morally consistent, infinitely compassionate and most definitely right, it’s pretty hard, but I like to think I try.

When we were in South America we met a great couple called Dan and Laura. Dan is a complete foodie. Especially when he’s had some glasses of wine. Then he starts talking tenderly and excitedly about food. When he talked about his dad’s vegetable plot in Guernsey, it practically made my eyes well up. And when he talked about some kind of meaty chicken thing involving taking all its bones out and rolling it up, even that sounded interesting.

One of the nice things about Dan is that he loves all food. He doesn’t think that a meal without meat is incomplete. He’s just as capable as getting excited about a shiny, bulbous, purple-black aubergine as a pimply, waxy duck carcass. It was great, because we both got to talk about food without anyone getting preachy.

I met a vegan the other day (at the Vegan Social Club of Beijing) who reckons every vegan dreams of opening a restaurant. Well, it has been decided, during our over excited, wine-drenched shouting, that Dan and I are without doubt going to open a restaurant where every vegan dish on the menu has a meat one next to it.

His meats would be “cruelty-free” (at least up to the point of slaughter). I would get a chance to convince meaty people that food without animals is OK. Vegans and non-vegans could go out for meals together. Dan and I would both learn more about food of all kinds. Maybe a couple fewer cows might die or a couple of pigs might lead a happier life.

I don’t know how many vegans would be into this kind of idea. Definitely not the preachy ones. I’m such a softcore vegan that when we were in Ecuador, and I was in charge of the kitchen on the farm, I actually cooked some kind of chicken in cream sauce for the workers (without tasting it, of course). Apparently it was really good, though I think they would say that, wouldn’t they.

I’m even quite interested in the mechanics of butchering and cooking meat. When our friend Esteban had a sheep slaughtered for his birthday I had to go away when they killed it - it was horrible. But once the deed was done, I quite enjoyed watching the neighbour use an ancient kitchen knife, wielded in a swish-slash-swish-sloosh-slash kind of way, to turn a previously terrified sheep into a set of chops, a woolly rug, and, well, a sheep’s head.

So, given I’m really only opposed to killing animals, rather than to meat itself (obviously I’m not going to buy or eat it), I’ve been thinking more about bringing the good stuff about meat into vegan food. It’s quite common to hear people express puzzlement about pretend meats (”I don’t see the point”), and it’s true that I don’t care for the taste of blood. And I have noticed the phrase “that really smells of fish” usually indicates distaste.

But one thing I’ve realised is that there is something missing in a lot of vegan cuisine that you get “for free” with meat, and that’s different varieties of chewy. So I hereby vow to investigate in full all its forms, chewy and preferably proteinous vegan foodstuffs, including seitan, tofu, and weird gelatinous things made from strange plants.

Who fancies some vegan whelk?