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> I think the key for me was getting to the point where I could cook really delicious vegetarian and vegan food so that from there it really was an equal choice

> I think the key for me was getting to the point where I could cook really delicious vegetarian and vegan food so that from there it really was an equal choice This is exactly the problem that I think western society has with its meat eating habits. People feel obligated to eat meat, like a meal isn't complete without it. Try feeding someone a vegetarian dish for dinner, and far too many people will complain that it doesn't contain meat. Even if they admit that it's tasty, they'll complain that it's vegetarian.

mikekchar 8y ago
While I think you are right, I think a lot of it depends on the context of the meal. My parents are not amenable to vegetable only meals. My father is actively hostile towards vegetarians (which was a significant problem for me when I was vegetarian, as you can imagine). However, when they came to my wedding in Japan, my mother in law took them to a tofu restaurant. Nearly a decade later my parents still rave about that meal. They never realised that the meal was completely vegan (shoujin ryouri). I refrain from telling them because I feel that for my father at least, it would ruin his memory of the meal. I love to cook and I used to do a lot of dinner parties when I as vegan. When I go out, I eat what I'm offered and am thankful for it (so I was never devoutly vegan). When I'm cooking, though, I cook what I like to cook and I almost never made any allowances for my guests' preferences (which is kind of selfish, but... oh well...) Generally people said they enjoyed the meals and many people who prefer meat told me that they were surprised that they could enjoy a meatless meal (for many people, eating at my house was the only time they ever ate vegetarian meals). My idea was always to cook meals that were traditionally vegan and lean on centuries of refinement by master cooks rather than to try to do something of my own invention. When you eat food in the correct context, it's hard not to enjoy it as it is (as long as it is cooked well). I tried not to do any fusion until I felt that I really understood the basics of both underlying cuisines, which for me took years of practice. Of course, your average person is not going to do this. I think that's really more the problem. People don't spend 2-3 years practicing Ethiopian vegan cuisine, but rather try a one off recipe -- and Ethiopian vegan cuisine is really hard to master. So the result is not so spectacular and they pair it with a seitan steak with teriyaki sauce, and a Caesar salad with the anchovies left out and you are just kind of left with culinary whip lash. It sounds really bratty for me to say it, but I don't like most vegetarian meals I can get in western developed countries. I think over time, as more and more people choose vegetable based meals, we will see a western style vegetarian cuisine developing that people will choose to eat simply because it is delicious. I think it is slowly happening, but it's really not there yet IMHO.
- stevenhuang 8y ago
  I enjoyed reading your perspective, thanks for sharing. What are some of your go to vegan recipes, say for dinner? I've yet to purposefully set out to make vegan meals and I'd like to change that.
  - mikekchar 8y ago
    This is a really good question because I was asking myself that just the other day. I was saying to my wife that I miss vegan food and want to eat it a couple of times a week. My wife agreed, but that meant I had to remember my recipes (which, alas, I never wrote down... yeah... I'm an idiot... When I was young, I thought "Oh it's all about technique, not ingredients, and I'll never forget this technique!"... yeah... stupid). Anyway, one of my go to dishes was a lentil stew with kale. I don't know why kale tastes good in lentil stew, but it really does. Some of the main things to keep in mind when doing vegan food is that you are going to be missing umami. The other thing is that most vegetables are sweet and when you make entire dishes out of vegetables, the dish will tend toward sweet. What you want to do, when you get the chance is to trade sweet for umami. You can also balance sweet with bitter (maybe why kale tastes good) and sweet with sour. Umami shows up in fermented food and seaweed, but also in things like tomatoes. You can also caramelise onions until they are quite dark, which cuts the sweetness down and gives you more depth of flavour. Generally alcohol is your friend and fermented foods like miso or shoyu (naturally fermented soy sauce) have tonnes of umami. They also break down the proteins into many different amino acids, so can play the same role in delivering flavour that cheese can. Try to find traditional producers that have aged varieties, because you'll have more amino acids, more umami and more alcohol. I use a 4 year old soy sauce when cooking (though probably impossible to find in North America). Your default should be Kikkoman, which is fermented for at least a year (and will probably be called Tamari outside of Japan, even though it isn't). One other quick thing about alcohol is that some flavours only dissolve in alcohol. Adding alcohol really helps because you can dissolve those flavours and then evaporate off the alcohol, leaving the flavour behind. When using alcohol, use the best that you can afford (which is usually whatever thing is taxed less in your country -- in Japan, whiskey is oddly efficient). I learned how to cook, originally, from the 3 volume "Mastering the Art of French Cooking", so I err on the side of relying on soup stocks for things. Making a good soup stock is super important and is one of the things I recommend practicing a lot. You can buy soup stock, but especially for vegan cooking you need to be able to pack a lot of flavour and you need to avoid the sweetness. Again, you can use tricks of roasting your veggies ahead of time and experimenting with different kinds. I also (for a long time) have used Japanese kombu dashi and also shiitake dashi. Basically, you soak kombu seaweed in water overnight in cold water, then bring the temperature of the water up until you just start to see bubbles rising from the kombu, take it off the heat and hold it for about half an hour. To make shiitake dashi, you add dried shiitake mushrooms to it at the same time you added the seaweed. Of course, after the stock is made, you should remove the seaweed and mushrooms and do something else with them. With this you can make a very nice umami stock (just add miso for miso soup) For the seaweed, as a side dish (especially for when you are drinking), roll up the seaweed and then slice it as fine as you can. It will get very slimey. Add a touch of hot sauce, vinegar, soy sauce and a drop of sesame oil. Mix it up and let it sit in the fridge for a while. Very high in iodine and if you eat that kind of thing every day, you don't need iodised salt. (Be careful if you have a thyroid problem, though!) So for a stew, the idea is that you want to layer these flavours. You can caramelise an onion, then add some tomato paste (or whatever scraps of tomatoes you might have around) and fry it down. Add some garlic (and potentially some grated fresh ginger). Then add the lentils and add your normal soup stock with a splash of some alcohol (red wine, beer, whisky, etc Careful with adding too much beer because it can be bitter. Same with wine because it can be sour). Cook it rather thickly until the lentils are done, with some herbs (whatever you like: maybe bay laurel, rosemary and sage -- that's a pretty "meaty" combination). Add some shiitake dashi to thin it out and salt using a combination of miso and salt (whichever proportion tastes good to you). Also mix in the rehydrated shiitake from the dashi -- they have a nice texture in the stew. Add some kale and cook until it has a texture you like. Readjust salt (the kale soaks up a lot). Finish with freshly ground pepper. Hopefully that will taste good. It's been a donkey's age since I made it and I might have forgotten something. Serve with rice. Another good candidate is actually ramen. I could write pages on this, but again take your stock, shiitake dashi and mix it 50:50 with soy milk (yeah, it's strange). Mix in grated garlic, ginger and miso paste (enough so that the whole thing is a bit saltier than you would like). Add black pepper and as much hot sauce as you like. Cook up some angel hair pasta in another pot. When done, put the pasta in a basket put a lid on it and shake off the excess water (very important). Put the pasta in a big bowl. Pour the soup over top (should be very hot) until it just covers the pasta. Add menma (lactic fermented bamboo strips), some cooled and squeezed out spinach (you can use frozen spinach, microwave it to thaw and then just wring out the juice -- which you can save for something else), and a single piece of nori seaweed. You can also put in that reconstituted shiitake in as well if you have any. Cover with a generous portion of sesame oil (at least a couple of teaspoons). This is surprisingly awesome (IMHO). Hope that gives you some ideas!

mikekchar 8y ago

While I think you are right, I think a lot of it depends on the context of the meal. My parents are not amenable to vegetable only meals. My father is actively hostile towards vegetarians (which was a significant problem for me when I was vegetarian, as you can imagine). However, when they came to my wedding in Japan, my mother in law took them to a tofu restaurant. Nearly a decade later my parents still rave about that meal. They never realised that the meal was completely vegan (shoujin ryouri). I refrain from telling them because I feel that for my father at least, it would ruin his memory of the meal. I love to cook and I used to do a lot of dinner parties when I as vegan. When I go out, I eat what I'm offered and am thankful for it (so I was never devoutly vegan). When I'm cooking, though, I cook what I like to cook and I almost never made any allowances for my guests' preferences (which is kind of selfish, but... oh well...) Generally people said they enjoyed the meals and many people who prefer meat told me that they were surprised that they could enjoy a meatless meal (for many people, eating at my house was the only time they ever ate vegetarian meals). My idea was always to cook meals that were traditionally vegan and lean on centuries of refinement by master cooks rather than to try to do something of my own invention. When you eat food in the correct context, it's hard not to enjoy it as it is (as long as it is cooked well). I tried not to do any fusion until I felt that I really understood the basics of both underlying cuisines, which for me took years of practice. Of course, your average person is not going to do this. I think that's really more the problem. People don't spend 2-3 years practicing Ethiopian vegan cuisine, but rather try a one off recipe -- and Ethiopian vegan cuisine is really hard to master. So the result is not so spectacular and they pair it with a seitan steak with teriyaki sauce, and a Caesar salad with the anchovies left out and you are just kind of left with culinary whip lash. It sounds really bratty for me to say it, but I don't like most vegetarian meals I can get in western developed countries. I think over time, as more and more people choose vegetable based meals, we will see a western style vegetarian cuisine developing that people will choose to eat simply because it is delicious. I think it is slowly happening, but it's really not there yet IMHO.

stevenhuang 8y ago
I enjoyed reading your perspective, thanks for sharing. What are some of your go to vegan recipes, say for dinner? I've yet to purposefully set out to make vegan meals and I'd like to change that.
- mikekchar 8y ago
  This is a really good question because I was asking myself that just the other day. I was saying to my wife that I miss vegan food and want to eat it a couple of times a week. My wife agreed, but that meant I had to remember my recipes (which, alas, I never wrote down... yeah... I'm an idiot... When I was young, I thought "Oh it's all about technique, not ingredients, and I'll never forget this technique!"... yeah... stupid). Anyway, one of my go to dishes was a lentil stew with kale. I don't know why kale tastes good in lentil stew, but it really does. Some of the main things to keep in mind when doing vegan food is that you are going to be missing umami. The other thing is that most vegetables are sweet and when you make entire dishes out of vegetables, the dish will tend toward sweet. What you want to do, when you get the chance is to trade sweet for umami. You can also balance sweet with bitter (maybe why kale tastes good) and sweet with sour. Umami shows up in fermented food and seaweed, but also in things like tomatoes. You can also caramelise onions until they are quite dark, which cuts the sweetness down and gives you more depth of flavour. Generally alcohol is your friend and fermented foods like miso or shoyu (naturally fermented soy sauce) have tonnes of umami. They also break down the proteins into many different amino acids, so can play the same role in delivering flavour that cheese can. Try to find traditional producers that have aged varieties, because you'll have more amino acids, more umami and more alcohol. I use a 4 year old soy sauce when cooking (though probably impossible to find in North America). Your default should be Kikkoman, which is fermented for at least a year (and will probably be called Tamari outside of Japan, even though it isn't). One other quick thing about alcohol is that some flavours only dissolve in alcohol. Adding alcohol really helps because you can dissolve those flavours and then evaporate off the alcohol, leaving the flavour behind. When using alcohol, use the best that you can afford (which is usually whatever thing is taxed less in your country -- in Japan, whiskey is oddly efficient). I learned how to cook, originally, from the 3 volume "Mastering the Art of French Cooking", so I err on the side of relying on soup stocks for things. Making a good soup stock is super important and is one of the things I recommend practicing a lot. You can buy soup stock, but especially for vegan cooking you need to be able to pack a lot of flavour and you need to avoid the sweetness. Again, you can use tricks of roasting your veggies ahead of time and experimenting with different kinds. I also (for a long time) have used Japanese kombu dashi and also shiitake dashi. Basically, you soak kombu seaweed in water overnight in cold water, then bring the temperature of the water up until you just start to see bubbles rising from the kombu, take it off the heat and hold it for about half an hour. To make shiitake dashi, you add dried shiitake mushrooms to it at the same time you added the seaweed. Of course, after the stock is made, you should remove the seaweed and mushrooms and do something else with them. With this you can make a very nice umami stock (just add miso for miso soup) For the seaweed, as a side dish (especially for when you are drinking), roll up the seaweed and then slice it as fine as you can. It will get very slimey. Add a touch of hot sauce, vinegar, soy sauce and a drop of sesame oil. Mix it up and let it sit in the fridge for a while. Very high in iodine and if you eat that kind of thing every day, you don't need iodised salt. (Be careful if you have a thyroid problem, though!) So for a stew, the idea is that you want to layer these flavours. You can caramelise an onion, then add some tomato paste (or whatever scraps of tomatoes you might have around) and fry it down. Add some garlic (and potentially some grated fresh ginger). Then add the lentils and add your normal soup stock with a splash of some alcohol (red wine, beer, whisky, etc Careful with adding too much beer because it can be bitter. Same with wine because it can be sour). Cook it rather thickly until the lentils are done, with some herbs (whatever you like: maybe bay laurel, rosemary and sage -- that's a pretty "meaty" combination). Add some shiitake dashi to thin it out and salt using a combination of miso and salt (whichever proportion tastes good to you). Also mix in the rehydrated shiitake from the dashi -- they have a nice texture in the stew. Add some kale and cook until it has a texture you like. Readjust salt (the kale soaks up a lot). Finish with freshly ground pepper. Hopefully that will taste good. It's been a donkey's age since I made it and I might have forgotten something. Serve with rice. Another good candidate is actually ramen. I could write pages on this, but again take your stock, shiitake dashi and mix it 50:50 with soy milk (yeah, it's strange). Mix in grated garlic, ginger and miso paste (enough so that the whole thing is a bit saltier than you would like). Add black pepper and as much hot sauce as you like. Cook up some angel hair pasta in another pot. When done, put the pasta in a basket put a lid on it and shake off the excess water (very important). Put the pasta in a big bowl. Pour the soup over top (should be very hot) until it just covers the pasta. Add menma (lactic fermented bamboo strips), some cooled and squeezed out spinach (you can use frozen spinach, microwave it to thaw and then just wring out the juice -- which you can save for something else), and a single piece of nori seaweed. You can also put in that reconstituted shiitake in as well if you have any. Cover with a generous portion of sesame oil (at least a couple of teaspoons). This is surprisingly awesome (IMHO). Hope that gives you some ideas!