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I'm honestly not at all a fan of fake poo poo. What makes food good is good ingredients, and the entire premise of fake poo poo is replacing one of the ingredients with something that, let's be honest, is worse. Because if it were better, it would be the real poo poo, and the stuff you're replacing would be the fake poo poo. This is doubly so because I'm a vegan. When you tell people you're a vegan (or even a vegetarian) often they think you buy a bunch of fake meat and fake cheese and eat like a non-vegan, just... worse. Which, to be honest, is how a lot of vegans and vegetarians in America do it, because most people in America grow up eating meat all the time and they just don't know how to change their diet without finding 1 for 1 replacements for meat and other animal products. I'm also not a fan of fake poo poo because some of the fake vegan poo poo is vile. I'll eat basically anything, and even cardboard Boca burgers and that weird greasy unappealing vegan "chorizo sausage" stuff are products that I'll happily consume if someone serves them to me. But a few weeks ago I had the displeasure of eating a vegan pizza made by Whole Foods, which was basically inedible. The memory of the fake cheese is... unpleasant. To put this in perspective, that pizza was in a room full of hungry people who had eaten up all the normal pizza, and not even the vegans would touch it. So I got to take it home, eat three bites, and then throw it out. My roommate gagged on it too. Which definitely puts me in a bit of a conundrum because unless I can come up with some kind of vegan shellfish or pork (not really sure how I'd swing that...) I need some kind of dairy in my ICSA. I was literally walking out of my door on the way to the market to buy some lemongrass and galangal and other stuff to make a mock duck Thai curry, the thought being that the coconut milk would be the fake milk and the mock duck would be the fake meat and I'd be mixing milk and meat, but before I got to my car I realized that would be a stupid loving idea because Thai curries are always made with coconut milk, not normal milk, so nobody would ever suspect them of being non-kosher. Since fake stuff was on the menu, though, I've been wanting to try, for a while, Serious Eats' vegan macaroni and cheese recipe because I've heard good things about it and I'm curious as to what it would taste like. I've had vegan cheese only a few times in my life and the last time was the Whole Foods pizza so the idea of an appetizing vegan cheese was intriguing - doubly so because I liked a good macaroni and cheese back before I was a vegan. Then I figured as long as I'm playing "try out fake poo poo from Serious Eats" (more accurately, from J. Kenji López-Alt, the mastermind behind this stuff) I might as well go whole hog and test out what is apparently a great vegan burger too. Why not? I can invite everyone over for hamburgers. This weekend turned out not to be good for inviting people over to grill burgers so I just made a single serving for myself and cooked it on my stove, but I've got the rest of my mix in the fridge for next weekend. Anyways onto the food. BUNZ Step one, we need buns for the burgers. Since this is a Jewish themed ICSA I decided I'd make pumpernickel buns, pumpernickel being a staple of Jewish delis which I no longer get to frequent because a vegan Reuben is not something I'd ever want to see attempted, let alone consume.  Ingredients for this are flour and rye flour, plus salt. The color and some flavor comes from cocoa powder, instant coffee (esperesso also is an option) and molasses. Not pictured because I forgot: caraway seeds. Also not pictured because it lives in the freezer: yeast.  I mix all the stuff that's not flour together. Looks nice and rich!  Then I incorporate the flour.  This is it after rising for about 2 hours and 15 minutes.  Potentially the dough was a little wet - I don't really mind, it just makes it harder to shape and harder to get high buns. The second issue isn't an issue at all - I prefer hamburgers that I can fit in my mouth, and massive buns make it that much harder. I've never seen the appeal of a tall hamburger. Here also you can see how terrible I am at shaping dough. This is what apathy looks like, folks. Most of the dough is still in my fridge and should hopefully last until next weekend - I'll work harder to make nicer buns for other people, probably. No shots of the finished buns here, although you can sneak a peek in one of the later photos. You'll notice at no point did I knead this bread. DAREE Gotta get something dairy-esque in there to combine with the hamburger (and to fulfill the side dish requirement of the contest). So the fake mac and cheese I've wanted to try for a while is a great choice.  From left to right: soy milk (faaaaaaaaaaaaaaake poo poo), a potato, miso, tomato paste with a brand name that sounds like the Yiddish word for "butt," so I guess that's appropriate for a Jewish ICSA, paprika, shortening, garlic, salt, mustard, an onion, elbow macaroni, garlic granules (a product I did not know existed until the recipe made me buy some), cashews.  Some prep: peel the potato, chop up the onions and garlic, get some other stuff measured, etc. That scale is there to make sure I get 4 oz of potato, because I can't eyeball "4 oz" as a measurement of potato.  The first step is to cook the onions and garlic until soft, then add the mustard, tomato paste, paprika, and garlic granules. The degree to which this becomes visually unappealing is perfectly contrasted by the degree to which it starts to smell amazing.  Adding the cashews and potatoes helps to make the mixture slightly less yucky looking but at this point that's irrelevant because it smells great. Cook some more.  Then you add some water and soy milk and miso and cook until the potatoes are tender. No picture of that because I just went right to the next step, putting it all in your blender. It looks gross now but hey, that's what you sign up for when you want fake poo poo I guess. Actually I lied - you don't put it in your blender, you put it in your roommate's blender. I own a food processor and a stick blender but no actual blender. My roommate actually disappeared for the summer a couple weeks ago and I have neither his email address nor his phone number, so I've just stolen his blender at this point. He's a super nice guy and he won't mind though. Really it's kind of disappointing because he's got an adorable cat that I hoped would be in the ICSA photos but he took the kitty with him.  Come back, kitty! Anyways you blend that poo poo up, mix it with some pasta water, and badabing, mac and cheese. The way you're supposed to do this recipe is to make it much more liquid than this - I'm sure you could get Kraft macaroni and cheese consistency out of this recipe if you want. I like my mac and cheese extremely hearty, though, so as you can perhaps tell from this, I made it fairly viscuous. At one point hot sauce was added - right before blending, I think. How does it taste? Wait until the end to find out! MEET Okay now hamburgers, except NOT. They fake as hell.  Whoops that's a lovely picture. Left to rightish: salt and pepper, cashews, button mushrooms, eggplant, celery and leeks, thyme, garlic, olive oil, can of chickpeas, baking powder, flour, bunch more mushrooms, soy sauce, Vegemite (it's a good thing I just happen to have Vegemite lying around - I love this stuff!), panko bread crumbs, pearl barley.  Cooking up the leeks and celery. Oh look, in the background you can see the pumpernickel buns, with the caraway seeds on top. To get those caraway seeds to stick I made a corn starch wash with 1/4 tsp corn starch mixed with 1/4 cup water. It seemed to work pretty well. This was a suggestion from the cookbook "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" which is where the pumpernickel recipe came from.  Meanwhile the mushrooms have been roasting with some thyme. Plus the eggplant has been wrapped in foil and is also being roasted. This is after taking the mushrooms out - the eggplant needed a bit more time in the oven.  I also cooked pearl barley. Basically you food process more or less everything except the pearl barley and mix it all together, but you don't process anything into a paste except half the chickpeas and the eggplant and some spices and stuff. The rest you leave sort of chunky, as pictured.  And, done! You mix in the panko bread crumbs right before cooking. Not a great picture, sorry. You can of course dress this up with all your favorite hamburger condiments and additions. Since I want to taste the burger I'm not putting anything on it this time. HOWZIT TASTE Actually quite good. As I said, I'm suspicious as hell of fake stuff, but it's all tasty. The macaroni and cheese is pretty much good enough to satisfy my macaroni and cheese needs, although I think I'll put in slightly less miso next time, and maybe leave out the hot sauce. Really though the main issue is that it's kind of a pain in the rear end to make - blenders are not fun to clean and sauteing like eight things is kind of more work than I want to go through to make macaroni and cheese, which, though delicious, is more rich than what I typically like to eat. Still, I imagine this would satisfy a kid who wanted mac and cheese, and it passed the most important test: it was good cold the next day after having been in the fridge, which is my favorite way to eat mac and cheese. I imagine it would also be good if I topped it with bread crumbs and stuck it in the oven. Yum. The burger's pretty good too. It tastes like basically what you'd expect: mushrooms plus the depth added by the leeks and celery, and some body added by the barley and chickpeas. I made a black bean burger for my very first ICSA a while ago (on the fly rather than from a recipe) and the real difference between those burgers I made and these burgers here is that these burgers are juicy like actual hamburgers. For normal human beings that's probably a huge plus, especially if you've suffered through awful dry hockey pucks that vegan burgers usually are, but I'm actually a weirdo who likes dry foods so although I really like this vegan burger, I'm not sure I'll bother following a recipe next time, as opposed to doing what I normally do, which is take whatever good stuff I have lying around, cook it up with some beans, and mush it all together. That works for me. Again though that's not to demean the burger itself, which I'm going to feel perfectly okay serving to other people as an example of vegan cuisine. The real winners are the buns, which are delicious. Pumpernickel turns out to be tremendously easy to make - unless you want some real structure to the dough you don't even have to knead it, and if you use caraway seeds the smell is just phenomenal. All the pumpernickel recipes I checked said the caraway seeds were optional but that's a lie. Get some caraway seeds. I haven't had pumpernickel in a long time and there was really no reason to have waited so long. If you want the recipe for this pumpernickel check out the cookbook I mentioned above. CONCLUSION Fake poo poo turns out to taste good if you make it right. But I still like real poo poo because I can be lazy. The easiest thing to make here was the pumpernickel and it was the only thing that's not fake. Real foods have had hundreds (sometimes thousands?) of years of refinement put into them - when generation after generation is cooking food, you can be pretty sure the effort to taste ratio is going to be more or less ideal for a lot of stuff, especially now that we have modern tools like pressure cookers and food processors. With fake poo poo you have to do all sorts of fancy stuff to replicate whatever you're going for. I prefer good old fashioned real food. Again though it all tastes great so maybe I should stop being a lazy dipshit. Also plenty of real food is quite labor intensive but I just never cook that stuff because I'm lazy. So I think the real lesson here is that I'm lazy. ICSAs (and feeding other people rather than myself) are the only things that rouse me from my laziness, so, thank you to toplitzin for organizing this one. I've said a lot of mean things about fake poo poo in this post but without this ICSA I would probably have never gotten around to trying either of these recipes, and I do think it's important to be able to say, for instance, that I've made vegan mac and cheese and that it tastes great. ADDENDUMB I checked all the ingredients and they were basically all certified pareve (as if that matters, because they're all pareve in fact). The hot sauce is not certified (although it's vegan), the molasses suspiciously has a "K" on the label but nothing official, and the miso is Korean and I'm not sure they've heard of Jews there.
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Jun 21, 2014 21:55
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 09:07 |
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That looks awesome and tasty! I'm now hungry for this whole post and I could serve it to my kosher friends too!
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Jun 21, 2014 22:42
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That burger looks super tasty!
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Jun 22, 2014 14:55
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Looks delicious, and custom buns, hell yeah 
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Jun 22, 2014 16:56
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For anyone interested in making anything, the buns have way more oven spring after a night in the fridge (although looking at this picture I realize I didn't capture that very well...): And if you're cooking on the stove you can stick an onion in the burger before flipping it and it's cool:  This is actually one area where these burgers are better than the drier bean burgers I usually make - you can make them thicker and juicier and treat them like actual burgers. With the onion and some ketchup and mustard (one of my favorite ways of eating burgers before I was a vegan) this thing's texture was way more like a hamburger than a bean burger.
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Jun 23, 2014 03:35
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I'm not a vegan, but I would eat the poo poo out of this.
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Jun 26, 2014 15:29
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 09:07 |
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Great job. I was captivated by those recipes when Kenji first posted them, but never bothered attempting them because 1) I'm not vegan, and 2) gently caress that amount of preparation for mac and cheese and a burger. It's awesome to see a real-world example of those, both of which I'd eat the poo poo out of. Also, anyone who thinks caraway doesn't belong in pumpernickel is a pinko commie.
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Jun 26, 2014 20:35
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