As an unrepentant carivore, I’ve found brined green jack fruit sautéed in BBQ sauce is pretty tasty.
Also, spiraled zukes is a good alternative to spaghetti.
In both cases, if I’m watching TV, I detect no notible difference to the real thing.
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I’m often carnivorous as well, but we used to make a vegan patty at work that was pretty good. we used to deep fry them, which makes everything taste good, though. I’m pretty sure they would stand up to grilling if you were careful, or pan frying no problem.
it was a lot of cooked quinoa, a lot of cooked beans (we used fava but shucking them took forever so we switched to navy, any legume should work) some sauteed onion, a little garlic, salt/pepper/spices and into the food processor. then de-stalk a bunch of kale or other thick-leafed green (although spinach worked fine, too), roll into a cigar shape and slice every few mm for thin ribbons. these had a structural aspect, the “threads” helped hold the patties together. There was also a little bit of something powdered that you added water to and it made a thickener/binder. It’s on the tip of my tongue–it was medium-brown colored. I’m probably forgetting some things but you hand-combined the kale ribbons and the re-constituted binder thing into the processed ingredients and patted it out. we panko coated ours for the fryer.
The above makes really good veggie patty platform that can be easily played with to taste. Does anyone know what that thickener/binder ingredient could be? I don’t think it was anything too obscure.
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Could be flaxmeal or ground chia seeds.
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flaxmeal. good looking out.
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Oh, vegan whackiness - just Google Fu “Aquafaba”.
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A good place to find vegan, often ‘cheap’ but not nasty recipes is Jack Monroe. She’s British, known for ‘austerity’ cooking. Site’s something like Cooking on a Bootstrap. You’ll have to google it, sorry. Start work in 3 hours and too tired to look now.
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Very interesting. I’ve learned from my chefs to never waste anything. In fact,over the last few days, I’ve been drinking a broth from the drippings of the last chicken I roasted (after eating all the potatoes I put in the roasting pan to cook in those drippings) and I save the bones and carcass to make stock.
I will have to save the water from my next whitebean boil and try to make macaroons or something, at least as proof-of-concept in how it all works despite not being vegan.
I’m in an aquafaba facebook group and it’s fun to see the stuff the vegan bakers are making with it. I am off sugar so most of the recipes don’t work for me. I whipped some canned chickpea liquid up and added it to a smoothie to lighten the texture of it. The texture was great but the taste was definitely affected. Someone suggested flax “egg” as an alternative that has a more neutral flavor, but after one super gooey weird experiment with that, I haven’t gotten back into it. My doctor says you can do 2 Tsp water + 1 Tsp flax, then let it sit for a few minutes, for a single flax egg, but I haven’t been motivated enough to try again with that.
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I’ve found that 3 Tbs water to 1 Tbs ground flax works better. Also, ground GOLDEN flax is better than the brown kind, for flavor (or rather, lack of a strong flax flavor). But it’s not a perfect substitution, no.
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