Why I think Teese is the best vegan cheese out there:
1) It tastes the best
2) It melts the best. See?
3) It keeps longer in the refrigerator without turning all pink. We know who I’m talking about here. And it freezes well.
4) It cleans up easier. I just discovered this one. You know how other vegan cheeses turn into glue if you don’t clean them up immediately? My tired, lazy ass left a teese covered knife sit out overnight. I thought for sure I’d be scraping on that for a while, but after a short soak, the stuck on bits slid right off. Cool!
Just to be fair, I’ll give the only minus I can really come up with. Okay, I’m sort of a freak about getting stuff on my hands, especially anything oily or greasy. Well, Teese feels REALLY nasty on my hands. And you’d think if it felt that greasy and gross that it would taste that way too. But no! It’s not heavy or greasy tasting at all! Wow, I somehow turned that downside into another plus. You’d think they were paying me to write this. They’re not, I swear!
A couple of weeks ago we had a big ‘ol vegan Thanksgiving to send off a friend to Ghana since she was going to miss it. We had all the appropriate goodies like Tofurky, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, etc. It was a huge carbfest! The best part is that we get to do it all again when real Thanksgiving rolls around. Woo hoo! I brought an apple pie and this Pumpkin Bundt with Maple Glaze.
It’s a veganized version of this recipe. I used flax seeds for a couple of the eggs and vegan sour cream for another couple. Then I just added a bit more soy milk to make up for the 1 less egg’s worth of eggy sort of stuff. And subbed maple syrup for the honey in the glaze.
So I’m going to try and participate in VeganMofo this year. That’s a post about vegan food every weekday for the entire month of October. Oy. We’ll see how that goes.
Kasan Red in East Atlanta now has a vegan special every Tuesday night 5-10pm. And it’s not a typical veggie burger, portobello mushroom, etc. that most non-veg restaurants offer you. Last week it was seitan stroganoff. I think tonight is going to be sandwiches of some sort. And yeah, they’re even going to make sure the bread is vegan, so they really are trying to do it right. So if you’re getting burned out on our typical options like I am, you should check it out. Oh, and I heard a rumor they might have vegan desserts too. 😉
Okay, I haven’t been baking non-stop all weekend, but I did get a few things done. I couldn’t let the extra time go to waste. My choice of what to make often revolves around what is convenient ingredient and time wise. Apparently I’m all about jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread lately. So why fight it?
First thing I did was feed all my cultures. And I saved some cast-off to make sourdough waffles.
sourdough waffles
First bread up is the Golden Raisin Bread. This one calls for a culture plus a little bit of commercial yeast. I still have two cultures I haven’t used yet, so this made use of one, the Alaska. With a good % of whole wheat flour and some rolled oats thrown in for good measure, this turned out to be a pretty hearty and healthy bread. My slashing is definitely a problem. Nothing I’ve tried is sharp or thin enough to do the job properly. I have some proper lames on the way though.
golden raisin breadgolden raisin bread crumb
Those went off without any problems. But I do dumb stuff from time to time. Like, I’ve had a dough rising in then oven, forgot and turned on the oven to preheat. Der. This weekend my dumb thing was to have the olive levain dough on top of my stove while the oven was preheating for the raisin bread. Oh yeah, on the burner above the oven vent. So I ended up cutting a chunk of that dough off. See, here is the olive dough cooking away on the burner with the raisin dough next to it and my waffle batter.
doughs
So, I kind of thought I might have killed the olive levain, but I continued as planned anyway. After a couple of folds, I shaped it and put it in the fridge to retard for what ended up being about 24 hours. It came out of the fridge a little sloppy and flat, so I kind of pulled it back into an oblong loaf shape, slashed it, spritzed it with water and threw it in the oven to bake, a couple of ice cubes chucked in the bottom for steam. Sure enough, it started rising. I hadn’t killed all the yeast! Sure, I lost some oven spring, but it still turned out wonderful. It has received nothing but compliments so far. I can only imagine how good it’ll be if I don’t try to ruin it!
This week Kevin picked up some of the Match Meats that Cosmo’s is now carrying. He got the ground beef and ground pork versions and here’s what we did with them. Since I had no idea how these things worked, I figured I’d just follow recipes that they give. The first one we had was the ground beef, in stroganoff form. The recipes are on Match’s website, but I don’t see an easy way to link to individual recipes, so go have a look if you’re interested. There were some extra steps in this recipe that other ground fake meat doesn’t require, but I think it gave it a better texture. Basically you had to spread it out on a baking sheet, bake it for a while, pull it out, crumble it, bake it some more, then use it in the recipe. I don’t really miss the texture of ground beef enough to go through all this on a regular basis. But it was pretty convincing and might be just the thing for you if you’re trying to find a meat substitute that your omni friends and family will like. Okay, it kind of looks like dog food here, but really, it was tasty!
"beef" stroganoff
The ground pork got formed into a tenderloin, rolled in seasoning, seared on all sides and then covered and cooked on the stovetop until it was heated through. I had trouble getting it to stay in log form but did manage to keep tube-like. The seasoning on the outside didn’t really come through. So I think next time I’d try something that involved mixing seasoning in. The texture felt like it might make a good pulled pork style bbq. Here it is with its best friends garlic mashed potatoes and roasted asparagus.
"pork" tenderloin
If I was more into fake meats in general, I’d probably rave about this a bit more. Both were really tasty. The beef version probably seemed more real than the pork one texture and taste-wise. But really, how would I know? I haven’t eaten meat in, like, 12 years. Good grief, now I’m seriously just rambling. Anyway, it’s a little different than any other products out there, so it’s worth giving a try to see how you like it.
