This is not a blog post about the morality of eating meat, as I very much enjoy eating several sorts of meat, and I wouldn’t think there was a moral problem, if a shark decided to eat me. After all, I am pretty sure I have eaten bits of shark. But even I have to admit that the production of meat is a serious problem, ecologically. We needed that Amazonian rain forest to create oxygen, you know? And there are health grounds for eating less meat, as anyone who listens to their doctor will know. Besides, it costs a fortune these days.
I’ve always thought it a bit odd that some vegans try to create realistic imitations of meat dishes, when there are a huge number of delicious vegan dishes that don’t look at all like meat. Instead, they look like the vegetables they are made from. They taste great, too, and I enjoy eating them.
But, as a way of saving money, being able to cook something that feels like a steak when I chew it, tastes a lot like a steak, doesn’t force me to go and floss my teeth after dinner, and costs much less than a steak has to be a winner. So, I ordered up some ingredients that were needed, online, and had a go at a recipe from https://itdoesnttastelikechicken.com which, by the way, has an excellent cookbook you can download.
The ingredients I didn’t have to hand were the rather strange sounding vital wheat gluten, and nutritional yeast flakes. This is not a good food for anyone with an actual gluten intolerance. I would also advise against it, if you have a problem with lentils, such as, you know, flatulence.
The recipe uses cups, tablespoons, etc, but lets you switch to metric, which is good. However, it then uses volumes for some of the ingredients, instead of weights, so I’m providing weights here. That’s right, I weighed the ingredients, as I measured their volumes. Such is my dedication to the cause…
Recipe websites have a tendency to use beautiful photographs of such things as all the ingredients, arranged artistically in a blender, but cooked lentils are hard to arrange artistically, so you get to see this, instead…
In the blender, you can see –
- 220g vital wheat gluten
- 220g cooked lentils
- 90g water
- 5g nutritional yeast
- 25g tomato puree
- 25g dark soy sauce
- 5g garlic powder
- 3g chili powder
- 3g liquid smoke
- 1g freshly ground black pepper
The internet suggested I’d need to cook half the final weight of lentils; I cooked a hundred grams of red lentils for ten minutes, and ended up with 280g, and if you think I ate the other sixty grams, you’d be correct. They smelled amazing when I was cooking them, so down they went.
There’s now a delicate balancing act to perform. If you run the blender for too long, all that gluten will form a solid block; not long enough, and there will be unmixed ingredients. As soon as that is done, tip the result out, and knead the lump, bearing in mind that you’ll be toughening it up if you go on too long.
Tip it out!
Cut it into four pieces. Now roll them out until they’re about half an inch thick. As you can see, I failed to do that, and ended up with thickish lumps. Next time, I shall be careful to do this, instead of trying to hand shape them…
They get steamed for about half an hour. After that, they go in a marinade in the fridge, until you are ready to use them, or you can freeze them.
- 50g water
- 20g olive oil
- 20g dark soy sauce
- 10g maple syrup, which I omitted
I left the maple syrup out because if you fry these in a hot pan, it will burn.
The next picture is what we actually had for dinner, after I made these – a chicken Caesar salad. Because that’s what I was asked for, when I explained what I had made. The next day, I cut up one of the steaks, and used it in a sweet and sour pork recipe, served with rice. I can confirm, these “steaks” are very much like meat to eat, but the flavour isn’t exactly right. I propose to fix that, by including distinctly non-vegan flavourings, like beef stock, the next time I make a batch. I will also roll them out properly!
