Burgers

I've been really into veggie burgers recently. I combine mashed beans (usually black eyed peas) and rice (Sri Lankan red keeri samba rice, which is short grained and fluffy), various random things for flavour (smoked paprika? soy sauce? vegan worcestershire? finely chopped onion?), chia seeds and or ground flax seed, and vital wheat gluten. Then, fry or bake. I really like the crisp crust that you get with a rice based burger.

Smoked dates

On pizza. Yes!

This is the dough from last time, defrosted. (Incidentally, I won't be doing this again. The dough was terrible: hard to handle and didn't have much oven spring. It might have overproofed.) It's topped with homemade tomato sauce, kalamatas, smoked dates, homemade melting mozz.

There will be more smoked dates on pizza in this house.

Vegan lemon meringue pie

Here's how you make a meringue that doesn't set:

I based it on my pavlova recipe, but used water instead of flax goop. In the pavlova recipe, I think the baking step provides the heat necessary to activate the agar, but I didn't plan to bake this meringue, only run it under the grill to brown, so I whipped half the water with the versawhip and sugar, and heated the other half in a pot with the agar (using twice as much agar as in the pavlova recipe). I then poured the agar mixture into the versawhip mixture and kept whipping. I ended up having to add more versawhip because it was taking forever to whip up properly. The agar left a few little lumps in the meringue, I guess because it solidified when it hit the room temperature versawhip mixture.

 I put the meringue on the pie, ran it under the grill, and it browned charmingly and the surface firmed up. Overall, the meringue layer was way too soft. It was runny rather than marshmallowy. Tasted good though. I guess the agar didn't do much work at all. It might have helped to use warm water in the versawhip mixture, and then leave the meringue to cool down and firm before grilling/serving.

Here's how you make a meringue that sets:

Take the pie you made in the first version. Freeze it. And voila!

The pastry wasn't that good frozen. So in future I might make a meringue disk, brown it, freeze it, and then place on the lemon tart to serve. It was the perfect texture.

Zero zero

I have made lots of pizzas, but this is the first time I've used 00 flour. The verdict: totally worth it. Or maybe the pizza gods were smiling for some other reason. Clearly I will need to do more research, where research means pizza making.

I used this recipe. I replaced some of the flour with vital wheat gluten (12 grams?) because the 00 flour was only 9.5% protein. After 1 day rising in the fridge, half of the recipe made 2 pizzas, the rest sat for a couple more days in the fridge and then went in the freezer for next time.

The first pizza was olive, pesto and homemade melting mozzarella. (I ferment the mozz a lot longer than the book calls for, and add a little bit of nutritional yeast. I think the homemade yogurt I used this time was an 80/20 soy/coconut milk blend.) This was fantastic. The crust was great, and the cheese melted really well.

The second pizza was inspired by this one. I made a bechamel with olive oil and soy milk, and added nutritional yeast, miso and a tiny bit of soy sauce. We had kale from our garden, which I tore up and massaged with oil like you would for a raw kale salad. I added a bit of parsley and spring onion, but I don't think they added much. This was really nice. Here it is, pre- and post- baking.