The best seitan

I've had this recipe for seitan from the Vegan Epicurean clipped for ages, but only got around to trying it recently. It's brilliant! I've been making seitan for more than a decade, so I thought I'd tried every method around, but this one surprised me with its unusual texture: it's soft and juicy, and definitely not brainy.

What's unusual about this recipe is that you pan fry the dough before cooking it in liquid (in the pressure cooker).

I halve the recipe (142g vital wheat gluten), skip the onion flakes, nutritional yeast and marmite, and add some mushroom seasoning to the dry mix. For the cooking liquid, I use vegetable stock with some soy sauce. I pressure cook the cutlets for 25 minutes.

After pan-frying:

After pressure-cooking, the cutlets increase a lot in size. They are quite soft. I like to cut them into pieces and brown before serving.

Posole

One of the foods I miss most from the USA is hominy. Occasionally you will see an overpriced can for sale here, but never dried hominy. For years, I've been hoping to try making it from scratch -- starting with field corn, and nixtamalizing it (cooking/soaking with slaked lime) -- but I couldn't even find field corn for sale.

Then, suddenly field corn turned up in my favourite continental grocery store. So, I made a trip to the Thai grocery store to pick up some slaked lime. I consulted a long-bookmarked post on the Cooking Issues blog. And then today I made nixtamal, and posole.

Only took 6 years or so...

Vegan chorizo and potato tacos

SO GOOD!

With homemade vegan chorizo, and perfect fried potatoes (parcooked with vinegar) -- all from Serious Eats.

Ants on a log ice cream

Celery and peanut butter ice cream with raisins:

I can't remember where I read about celery sorbet with raisins and peanut butter. Rather than a sorbet, I decided to make more of an 'ice cream' by mixing the peanut butter into the celery juice mixture. (Ingredients: celery juice, celery leaves, water, sugar, peanut butter, powdered peanut butter, refined coconut oil, raisins, xanthan gum)

This was pretty good. I was worried about the peanut butter overpowering the celery, but the celery came through clearly. In fact, I think what would put this over the top into utter deliciousness would be a peanut butter ripple. Next time...

Homemade tempeh

For a long time I wanted to try making tempeh, but I was put off because it sounded too hard. First, the whole process of splitting and getting the hulls off the soybeans seemed like a big hassle. And second, it seemed like you would need an incubation chamber to keep the fermenting tempeh at a stable warm temperature. But reading Sandor Katz' The Art of Fermentation convinced me that it was totally doable.

I bought my starter culture from Indopal.

I decided to skip the whole issue of splitting and hulling soybeans by using split hulled broad beans (fava beans) instead. I begin by soaking 460g of beans for 24 hours (the long soak at a warmish temperature allows them to start fermenting -- according to Katz this step probably creates a good environment for the tempeh mold to grow in).

The next step is to partially cook the beans. You definitely want to under-cook them: they need to be firm so that they don't mush together. Firm beans allow space between them for the tempeh mold to grow. I simmered these beans for about 12 minutes; they were firm but some were starting to get feathery on the edges.

Next, you let the beans cool to body temperature. It's important that they are dry -- with a batch this size it works well to tip the beans onto a towel and dry them. Then you put them into a bowl and stir through the starter thoroughly (the amount might depend on your particular starter -- mine calls for 1 tsp).

For the next step, you put the beans into sandwich bags, which you have poked some air holes into with the point of a knife. For this batch, I used 4 10x15cm bags. You should smush the beans down so that they fill the bags all the way to the corners.

I like to do all of this in the morning, on a day when I will be around to keep an eye on the incubation. For the first 12 hours, the tempeh needs to incubate at about 28 degrees. Luckily or unluckily for me, in the summer time in my house that's about room temperature, so I don't need an incubation chamber. After about 12 hours, the tempeh mold should have started growing and creating its own warmth. If you were using a heat source to incubate the tempeh, this would be the time to turn it off or down, and this is why I like starting in the morning: the cooler night time temperature arrives at the right time for the tempeh.

(When it's cooler, I've had success using my Excalibur dehydrator as a heat source. I run the dehydrator at its lowest temperature (85F) and put the tempeh on racks on top of the dehydrator, and then cover the whole lot with an overturned bowl to keep the warmth in. I check the temperature every so often, and turn the dehydrator off if it's getting too warm.)

After 24 hours, tempeh:

The David Lebovitz effect

I'm very suggestible. Reading this post on David Lebovitz' blog, along with the fact that I had some chickpea liquid in the fridge to use up, led directly to a completely unnecessary, yet somehow very necessary S'mores Pie.

It got a bit burnt under the grill, but I'm pretending that was intentional.

The crust is the Press-in Almond Crust from Vegan Pie in the Sky with some dark cocoa powder added. I baked it at 350 F for 10 minutes.

The chocolate pudding is this one, halved and veganised. (I added a tiny bit of liquid smoke but it was pretty subtle.)

The marshmallow topping went like this:

75 g chickpea liquid
75 g sugar
pinch of cream of tartar
0.5 g xanthan gum
vanilla
--whipped together

Then things get a little bit hazy...
I heated up agar (0.7 g?) with water (not a lot) and sugar (some). It got to at least 108 C (I was originally planning on letting it get to 118, but it was starting to look right so I pulled it early.) I poured this mix down the side of the mixer bowl as it mixed the meringue on high speed. (This is based on my recipe for marshmallows, but with more liquid [here the chickpea liquid is straight out of the can, not reduced]. It ends up marshmallowy but softly set.)

Spread the marshmallow topping on top of the pudding. Put it under the grill and watch it carefully. Put it in the fridge to set up.

Birthday cake

Not the prettiest, but the tastiest:

I made pistachio dacquoise, using my recipe but with chickpea liquid instead of versawhip. I didn't bother with heating the agar mix, I just mixed everything together and assumed that the agar would activate during the baking. (To be honest, I'm actually not even sure whether the agar and xanthan are necessary.)

The filling was a salted caramel mousse, based on a peanut butter mousse from The Voluptuous Vegan. Each dacquoise disk had one side painted with melted chocolate with some roughly ground coriander seeds and some dehydrated ground whole lemon mixed in. I thought I would make some beautiful swirls of chocolate on top but... well, you can see how well that worked. (I didn't count on the chocolate solidifying immediately on the cold mousse!)

I was aiming for the dacquoise to soften slightly, but hoped the chocolate would prevent that from happening too fast. After sitting for about 4 hours, the disks were still quite crisp. 24 hours later, they were quite soggy. Somewhere in between they would've been perfect. The flavour, though, was amazing. I got the idea for the flavour combination from this recipe for Pistachio Millionaire's Shortbread.