Banoffee pie

Banoffee/Banoffi pie, veganized:

The crust is the shortbread tart shell from Vegan Pie in the Sky (but with some of the margarine replaced with coconut oil). Then there's a layer of soy 'dulce de leche', then a layer of sliced bananas, and then it's topped with coconut whipped cream (1 cup coconut cream, 0.5 g xanthan gum, whipped in the cream whipper) and there's some chocolate flakes on top. (I decided to skip the coffee from the original because I wasn't sure how it would go with the coconut.)

Dulce de leche?

So, I thought I would try to make vegan dulce de leche. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't, but I ended up making something delicious and learning some things about the Maillard reaction.

I used a recipe from this thread (but with soy milk powder) to make some homemade sweetened condensed milk, then put it in a jar in the pressure cooker for 30 minutes, ala this recipe. And the result, after 30 minutes pressure cooking and a natural cool down? It hadn't changed colour at all.

I remembered that when I caramelized vegan white chocolate in the pressure cooker, it took about twice as long as regular white chocolate. So I stuck the jar back in the pressure cooker for an hour, again letting it cool down naturally. Finally, some results!

Tasty stuff! But after doing some reading, I think it might be more accurate to call it caramelized sweetened condensed milk. The thing is that true dulce de leche involves the Maillard reaction -- a reaction between proteins and sugars. But only certain sugars ('reducing sugars') work -- and regular old table sugar (sucrose), like I used in my sweetened condensed milk, isn't one of the ones that takes part in this reaction. I think in real dulce de leche, it's the sugar in the milk (lactose) that takes part in the Maillard reaction. Apparently glucose is a reducing sugar, so I might try this again with glucose some time.

Whipped cream experiments

This is a variant on Isa Moskowitz's  Rad Whip, whipped in a cream whipper. I'm pretty impressed that it worked so nicely!

I replaced the original recipe's cashews with tofu, mainly to avoid any danger of clogging the cream whipper -- my blender is not the best at pureeing cashews.

The recipe I used:
84 g firm silken tofu
76 g coconut cream (i.e. coconut milk with about 30% fat; I bet regular coconut milk would be fine)
1 cup soy milk
1.5 g agar powder
3 T sugar
2 T plus 2 t coconut oil (liquid)
1 t vanilla

1. Puree the tofu with the coconut cream and half the milk (in a blender).
2. Heat the other half of the milk with the sugar and agar, bring to the boil and simmer for about 5 minutes. Add the coconut oil.
3. Stream the agar mixture into the tofu mixture with the blender running. Add the vanilla.
4. Transfer to a bowl and place it in the fridge to cool.
5. When it is cold and firm, scoop it back into the blender and puree. Now it's ready to put into your cream whipper. (Mine is a 500ml whipper, which means that its capacity is actually 250ml or about one cup, which is about half of this recipe.)
6. At least an hour before you want whipped cream (preferably even longer, like a day before, because it seems to get better the longer it sits), add the mixture to the cream whipper, close it up and add the N2O. Shake it a few times, then put the whipper in the fridge. (Some people suggest laying it on its side, but I don't know if that matters -- I haven't noticed a difference.)
7. When you want whipped cream, turn the whipper upside down and shake downwards firmly (like you would if you were trying to get the last bit out of a shampoo bottle). Then squeeze the trigger. My results haven't always been quite as pretty as in the photo, but I'm not sure why.

For a simpler, straight coconut whipped cream, my current best recipe is:
1 cup coconut cream
0.35 g xanthan gum

Disperse the xanthan in the coconut cream with a stick blender, or by pouring the xanthan into the vortex while running the regular blender. The mixture is now ready to put into the cream whipper. As mentioned above, this needs to be at least an hour before you want the whipped cream, and preferably a day or more before.

Parsnip ice cream

I have to admit that I am always more drawn to the weirder ice cream flavours than the classics. And so it came to pass that I made parsnip ice cream, based on this recipe by Barbara Kafka. (I replaced the cream with coconut milk/cream*).

Anyway, this was really good. I loved that I got to taste it: it's really sweet and nutty, in a sort of chestnut/sweet potatoey sort of way. I think that with the right accompaniments, it could be really amazing, but as a flavour on its own I had my fill after a few bites. And now I am regretting that I didn't make something more boring (I mean, 'classic').

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 * I used some mysterious coconut product I had in a container in the fridge. Usually that would be coconut milk, but recently I have been playing around with coconut whipped cream, and have been buying something called coconut cream which is coconut milk with about 30% fat. Most likely it was a mix of coconut milk and cream.

Padron peppers

Homegrown Padron peppers, stuffed with cashew goat cheese (from Artisan Vegan Cheese) and fried:

I only wish the snails hadn't eaten so many of my seedlings -- these were so good that the three pepper plants that survived are not enough for us. Definitely planting more (and defending them from the snails more carefully) next year.

Padron peppers are supposed to be mild, with only the occasional hot one, but so far all of the ones I have harvested have been hot. I think this probably has to do with the climate in Perth. Still, they are delicious, and not unbearably hot.

Burma

This week has been all about Burmese food, ever since I picked up Naomi Duguid's Burma: Rivers of Flavor from the library. We have suffered through quite a heatwave, so we've mostly tried the salads. 

Here you see Mandalay Grated Carrot Salad, and Peas for Many Occasions. This might've been my favourite meal so far. It seemed like every bite of the carrot salad was a little different -- it has all the typical Burmese salad flavourings of lime juice, fresh herbs (coriander, mint), peanuts, fried shallots, 'fish sauce', toasted chickpea flour, and green chile. I used my homemade fish sauce, based on a recipe from Chowhound but with some added stinky tofu. Duguid advises that vegetarians should replace the recipe's dried shrimp powder with extra toasted chickpea flour plus some soy sauce or miso, so I added some soy sauce. The recipe for Peas (in this case chickpeas) is simple and quick if you start with canned beans, and tastes like much more than the sum of its parts (turmeric, shallots, 'fish sauce', herbs, lime juice). Together, they made a really quick and satisfying lunch.

And here, clockwise from left there's Punchy-Crunchy Ginger Salad, Shan Tofu Salad, and Succulent Pomelo Salad. The ginger salad was great. Along with the ginger, napa cabbage and tomatoes, you have all the usual suspects (fish sauce, lime, peanuts etc) plus pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds. I left out the fried garlic and garlic oil because I didn't have any on hand. Still, it was marvelous. And the Shan tofu salad was pretty great too. I had just made the tofu, and it had only been in the fridge for 1 hour rather than the recommended 4, but it was already sliceable. The silky texture of the cold tofu was really nice with the dressing of garlic/soy sauce/lime leaves/rice vinegar. I didn't have any shallot oil on hand, so sprinkled on some fried shallots.

We've also tried the Intensely Green Spinach and Tomato Salad with Peanuts, the Okra-Shallot Stir-Fry, and the Tamarind-Pumpkin Curry. These three didn't wow me as much, but they were all pleasant.

When these recipes work, they really work. I don't know if it's just because I am not familiar with Burmese food, but I find something really mysterious and fascinating about the flavour combinations.

Overall, from a vegan perspective, this is a book worth looking at. There are lots of interesting salads and vegetable curries, some soups and snacks (I'm looking forward to trying the (inherently vegan) rice crepes) as well as quite a few condiments (chutneys, chile sauces etc) and desserts. Most of the recipes require substitutions (there's fish sauce and or shrimp powder in just about all the vegetable recipes, it seems) but I really appreciated the fact that Duguid gives some suggestions for how to make these replacements (p. 31).