Review of Beyond Meat @ Tropical Smoothie Cafe

I was curious to try the new "Beyond Meat" product at Tropical Smoothie Cafe. I'd had it a couple of times other places but it was always super bland and not that good. These looked better, but I was curious what non-vegetarians would think. Often I think fake meat is not that realistic, while other veg*ns think it's just like the real thing.

So I bought several sandwiches (Thai peanut, Jamaican jerk, and buffalo) for myself and 6 of my colleagues and we had a taste test. Here's the pile of sandwiches before opening:


The ratings for "overall quality / deliciousness of the sandwich" on a scale of 1 to 100 came out at a mean of 80.8 (ranging from 70 - 90). The ratings for "chickenness" of the beyond meat (as compared to a similar sandwich from Cosi or something) had a mean of 79.4 (68-90). One participant noted that it wouldn't pass for a good roast chicken, but was virtually identical to the generic chicken you get in other sandwich shops.

Here are the tasting notes / reviews (I was #7):

1. Tasty but I'd be interested to know more about it (nutritional info, environmental footprint, ingredients, etc).
2. I found the texture to be fairly convincing. I only tried the chicken and not the sandwich so I'll   give it a 50.
3. The buffalo "chicken" sandwich was great. I would likely order it in the future, especially because I love buffalo chicken sandwiches but the chicken skeeves me out at most places that serve them.
4. Great taste, with firm texture (sightly more so than real chicken, with much less fat). 
5. That's a good sandwich!  I was surprised a how chicken-like the beyond meat was, they almost nailed the texture!
6. I like how the consistency is very consistent - no weird tendon parts or fat. The flavor is just as good if not slightly better than actual chicken. Curious how the stuff is made, shipped, prepped at the shop, and how it might hold a marinade
7. The texture is less smooth / shiny than chicken, and the fibers don't align as well. However, the flavor is pretty similar, and once you're chewing it the texture is reasonably similar to real chicken as well. The sauces on the Jerk and Thai sandwiches were great, the "buffalo" was just hot sauce. The overall experience was crazy salty, I was chugging water all afternoon.

What does a vegan butcher shop look like?!

Just so you're not in suspense, here's the short answer (a shot of the deli case):



Gutenfleischer's is a vegan butcher shop located inside a vegan bakery (Dough) in Atlanta, GA. The basic setup is similar to a traditional deli. OK, it's not really a vegan "butcher shop" because you don't get to choose a particular "cut" of wheat or soy (e.g. "I'll take a radicle, two cotytledons, and a lean cut of endosperm"), but you do get to choose from an array of homemade fake meats (made from wheat gluten, or seitan) which are then sliced super-thin on a real meat slicer:



The end result looks like this, not terribly different from what you'd buy at a normal deli. Super-thin slices wrapped in plain brown wax paper (please ignore the old toaster oven tray they're sitting on):


Being curious, I naturally had to try every one, and I knew that Sarah would want to as well. So I ordered a quarter-pound each of all nine flavors, which kept her slicing for quite a while. Those were ham, Cajun ham, Canadian bacon, roast beef, Genoa salami, pepperoni, pepper turkey, buffalo turkey, and herb turkey. I also got a hot sandwich (a roast beef "au jus" thing which was surprisingly tasty and satisfying), a vegan sausage biscuit with tofu scrambled egg, and some desserts.

Unfortunately I visited about two months ago, so I don't have a perfect recollection of each of the meats. However, overall we enjoyed them quite a bit. Relative to their meaty cousins, these certainly tended to be significantly less juicy, although to be fair it took us a few days to get to all of them, which likely dried them out a bit. As you'd probably expect, they didn't taste just like meat, but they did have lots of flavor. The ham and bacon were the closest to tasting like the real thing, and might even fool someone not paying close attention. Most of them were very different, but good in their own way. For example, the Genoa salami didn't taste like salami much, but it did have a lovely peppery flavor. The turkey buffalo was nice and spicy, the pepperoni was complex and delicious, and while the roast beef had a mild flavor I still definitely enjoyed it.

If you find yourself visiting Atlanta it's definitely worth stopping by. Aside from the surreal experience of watching logs of vegan meats be sliced, and the unique culinary experience, you also may get ideas for changing up your diet at home.

Frankentoys: satisfying a destructive dog without constant new toys

We have a very playful dog who enjoys destroying toys. But it's not very "green" to keep buying new toys and throwing them out. Fortunately, Sarah has come up with an excellent solution which involved combining scraps of old toys together into new toys which the dog considers fun and exciting again. You will need the following:
1. A few old toys which your dog has extracted the stuffing from and grown bored with
2. An old chewed up rope toy (we used a rope lobster)
3. A happy dog

For our latest toy surgery, we began with a new large monkey toy Leeta got as an early Christmas present, which was extremely popular:


She loved the toy, and had great fun playing with it for a few days before we ended up in this situation:


Note the shell of the monkey, as well as several other old toys in the area. To proceed, take the shell of the toy, and restuff it with other toy shells. Tennis balls, spare squeakers, and the old stuffing also make excellent things to restuff the toy with. The less ripped the shell is, the easier this will be. If only one end of a long tubular toy is ripped you can just restuff it and call it a day, but since this monkey was quite ripped up, I had to cut off several strands from the rope toy and use them to tie the new toy together so it would stay intact. And behold, a fun new frankentoy is ready to be rediscovered by your dog!

We can generally get away with recombining old toys several times before she gets truly bored with them. Not every combination works, the most effective strategy seems to be a mix of a toy she still plays with regularly, and some old toys she has forgotten about (which may be interesting again). It's also key for her to have to work at it to be able to extract the new stuffing, although she still enjoys shaking them around and chasing them even before she settles down to redestroy them. There are some toys you can get that are designed to have parts removed and restuffed which we also like (http://www.amazon.com/Kyjen-Babies-Original-Series-Platypus/dp/B0009YHTA6), but this is a great way to reuse all of the normal toys you may get.

Garlic Extract

I get kind of crazy about high-quality hardneck garlic at the farmer's market. It has a strong, rich flavor, and a thick, oily texture that I find entirely different from normal garlic. Our local Whole Foods usually only has extra-gross garlic with that odd baloney smell old garlic often gets. To be able to taste quality garlic in the off season, I decided to start making my own garlic extract (which also makes cooking a lot more convenient).

First, while this picture isn't great, you can see the difference in how much garlic oil there is between the good garlic (at left) and the normal garlic (at right):



Anyway, to capture that goodness, just chop up a ton of good garlic, and let it soak in some decent vodka. No need for top-shelf, but please don't use gross super-cheap vodka which has off flavors. Svedka has the best quality: price ratio in my opinion, so it's what I used. Here's the vodka soaking up the garlic flavor:




After it tastes sufficiently garlicky (I gave it 2 days in the fridge), strain through a cheesecloth. Now you can just add a splash of it to your stir fry, and it will taste like fresh garlic! Wayyy better that garlic powder.

Vegan Cheese (and wine) Party

When we saw the post about tofu misozuke on recipe renovator, we knew we had to try it. Then VegNews came out with a special issue about making aged vegan cheeses (using new recipes from Miyoko Schinner's new book: Artisan Vegan Cheese), so we figured it was time for a wine and vegan "cheese" party:


Naturally, I wanted to collect data on how tasty and "cheesy" each of our creations were (and look for differences between vegans and non-vegans). Since that data was too interesting to skim over, I posted the full results with some intriguing charts and graphs over on my other blog (Science Jon). For this post, I'm just providing an overview of the homemade cheeses.

Tofu Misozuke

This was some interesting stuff. As detailed in recipe renovator, these take a while. We aged them for two months to get as creamy a texture as possible. We followed the precise directions for the nori, plain, and red pepper misozuke, but we really wanted to do garlic as well. Since garlic is supposed to be an antibiotic, we were worried it might interfere with the process, but it worked well. We added about 1 tsp of garlic powder and 1 Tbsp garlic vodka / garlic extract (stay tuned for more info on this stuff) to the basic plain marinade. The clear favorite was the garlic, followed by pepper, followed by nori, with plain the least popular flavor. To me most of them had kind of an alcohol flavor which was off putting, and overall these were much less popular than the homemade aged cheeses (see below). But the texture was fantastic.

The next three cheeses were all made with cashews and rejuvelac from Miyoko Schinner's recipes.

Goat Cheese (Chèvre) with Herbs de Provence

This was the clear favorite at the party (although vegan lady herself hated it). On a scale from 1 to 9 it got a 7.9 on flavor (even with Sarah's rating of 2 included) and 7.4 / 9 on cheesiness. It took about four days total, and had a great creamy texture, with a nice mild flavor with just enough bite. The herbs were a great touch too. We did 48 hours of aging for the first step, then 48 more hours after all of the other ingredients were added. As a final note, our rejuvelac didn't arrive in time for this one, so we ended up using some vegan probiotic liquid / kefir instead for the first round(which had less of a cheesy flavor). We did add some rejuvelac when we added the final ingredients.

Sharp Cheddar
 
This was a close second for favorite cheese at the party, and definitely had the most authentic "cheesy" flavor I've ever had in vegan cheese (thanks to the secret ingredient, rejuvelac). I'm not clear why this never firmed up like it should, but it worked well as a spread too (not a "cheesy" texture, but great flavor). We did soak the cashews for almost two days rather than 3 hours since we wanted a smoother texture, so maybe they absorbed too much water? We went with the full 72 hours of aging to develop plenty of flavor, then another 24 hours in the fridge. The mean flavor rating was 7.7/9, and it got a 5.4/9 for cheesiness (mostly b/c of the texture).

Buffalo Mozzarella
 
The nonvegans who knew what fresh mozzarella was like were especially impressed with the texture of this one. It doesn't taste like much (it's not really supposed to), and the texture was soft and creamy. I found it boring on crackers, but the leftovers did work well on vegan pepperoni pizza. It got 6 on flavor, and 5.7 on cheesiness. This recipe started with straining 2 cups of soy yogurt to yield a 1 cup of much thicker yogurt. But when we checked our cheesecloth-lined colander in the morning, none of the liquid has strained out. So instead,  we added an extra 1/2 Tbsp of tapioca flour and 1/4 tsp of agar powder to 1 cup of normal (non-drained) yogurt. Everything else went according to plan (we used 24 hours of aging).

We also sampled Daiya Cheddar wedge, Dr. Cow w/ Blue-Green Algae, Galaxy Cream Cheese, Tofutti Ricotta (we served it cold, but apparently when heated it melts and becomes way better), and Wayfare Hickory Cheddar. We also had Vegan Queso (from Food for Lovers), Sheese Cream Cheese, and Tofutti Cream Cheese, but since those three were unplanned they weren't on the data sheet and not many people submitted ratings for them.

Overall, we decided that the misozuke was too much work and not good enough to make again. If you think of it as a pate rather than a cheese it's better. The other three aged cheeses were all easy enough and tasty enough to make again, especially the cheddar and the goat cheese (although again, Sarah really didn't like the goat cheese). The commercial cheeses by comparison were pretty disappointing overall, but there was huge variety in which cheeses each person loved and hated.

Trash into treasure: homemade vegetable stock from scraps

Vegetable stock is delicious, but it's expensive to buy and a pain to make. The idea of keeping vegetable scraps to make it from (saving hassle and expense) is an old one, but the scraps always spoiled before I had enough to make a balanced broth. But a few years ago, a friend of ours mentioned that he just keeps the scraps in the freezer until he has enough. Brilliant! We now keep a large tub in the freezer and wait until it's full to make vegetable stock. Using a pressure cooker it only takes about 35 minutes or so to cook (we cook it for 25 minutes on high after it's up to pressure).

Here's what it looks like before cooking:


In this batch we had leek greens, parsnip and carrot peels, red and yellow tomato ends, mushroom stems, and garlic ends. Other times we put in celery leaves, sweet potato or butternut squash peels, sometimes even kale stems for health (although inexplicably our dog loves kale stems, so she usually gets those now). Things that are slightly blemished are fine to go in (you'll filter out the solids anyway) even if you wouldn't put them in soup. Just nothing that has spoiled. Also, don't put too much onion / garlic or they can dominate the flavor.

Directions:
dump the big bowl of frozen scraps into a pressure cooker
If you don't plan to compost it in a worm bin afterwards, add some salt (maybe 1/2 tsp) which will help to pull the flavors out
cook on high 25 minutes
strain out into a big glass bowl, use some in a recipe right away if you like (or put in the fridge if you'll use it within a few days). Break the rest up into 2 cup increments and store in the freezer for whenever you need some vegetable stock

We make ours salt-free because afterwards the cooked scraps go into our worm bin. So we get remarkably good fresh veggie broth for free (and by freezing it, we always have some available), and nothing gets wasted since it all gets composted in the end and was just scraps that we wouldn't use otherwise anyway! This is truly one of our favorite kitchen tricks.

What has vegan lady eaten lately?

Vegan lady finds herself too busy to write here more often than not now that she's back in grad school, and I can't keep up with all of the great stuff we eat on my own. So here's a quick sampling of some of what we've been eating lately. Sorry there are no recipes, but leave a comment if you want one and we'll see what we can do.


Seitan braised in red wine mushroom sauce (incredible):

with some kale added for health:

tempeh tacos w/ Mexican slaw (the tempeh used the marinade recipe from "fajitas" on http://food.veganjon.com):

Simple Thai salad (nothing fancy, just a way to use up some leftover peanut-coconut dipping sauce from our spring rolls):

Roasted cardoon, jerusalem artichoke, and parsnip:

If you have never heard of cardoon before (we hadn't), it's a relative of the artichoke which looks like celery but tastes like a bitter artichoke:

Raw parsnip beet salad with pineapple-mint dressing:

Bonus points for making the salad with striped Chioggia beets:

But still good if you make it with normal beets (we liked it enough to make it twice):

and finally, pumpkin parsnip kale lasagna (with parsnips FINALLY at the farmer's market, I just can't help myself):