I mean have you all seen the videos in tiktok about the zero hygiene they have in the street food places while preparing the food, oh my…
I would kill myself if I had to eat Indian food regularly. Perfumed slop. Indian “cuisine” is by far the worst in the world.
Ohhhh scary, buzzz words… Chemicals.
Water is a chemical. Salt is a preservative This is fucking stupid.
What a brain dead post, which makes sense given the unfunny and lame as fuck “I’ve depicted the group I don’t like as soyjack” bs
No animals were harmed except for the ones Impossible tested on.
btw.But why choose when you can have both?
Here’s my thing about meat: I’ll switch away from meat if you make it taste good. It doesn’t have to pretend to be meat, as long as it tastes good, that’s all I care about. I will still eat the occasional burger or bbq, but if you can find me vegetarian or vegan recipes that make me as happy as bbq does, I’ll try it.
I’m not vegetarian or vegan, but occasionally do a diet with my wife that makes us get creative with food. Here’s a few things I still eat:
Pad Thai is a good place to start
Oreos are surprisingly vegan
Taco Bell’s bean burrito, actually most Mexican food can just replace the meat with refried beans.
Bacon bits are vegan, toss them on some pasta like Cacio e Pepe
Chipotle’s chorizo is fake pork sausage, get it in either a bowl or a burrito.
Then the classics:
- tomato soup with grilled cheese
- peanut butter and jelly
- pancakes
- mac & cheese
- All cakes and pies (well excluding chicken pot & Shepard’s)
Okay, I hadn’t thought about pad Thai, but I love pad Thai.
I hadn’t thought about taco bell since its been a while since I’ve been there.
How are bacon bits vegan?
I haven’t tried Chipotle’s chorizo, I’ll have to try it out.
Thanks for the suggestions!
For bacon bits, they’re talking about the drid stuff in the plastic cans - “Bacos” and similar. They’re usually soy based with artificial flavor - probably for longer/safer shelf life
Ah, okay. I was like, “how is something with ‘bacon’ in the name even remotely vegetarian, much less vegan.”
That makes sense, although now I wonder how they’re able to sell them as “bacon bits” if they don’t actually have any bacon in them.
I said this above as a reply to another comment, but I do feel there are a lot of interesting dishes around the world that would be loved almost universally and I wish they would become universally accessible too
Oreos are surprisingly vegan
It’s less surprising when you realize that stuff that processed almost might as well have been constructed from raw hydrocarbons. It’s like some NileRed “turning paint thinner into cherry soda”-level shit.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
turning paint thinner into cherry soda
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
por que no los dos
My only problem with Indian food. Whenever I try a restaurants it’s shit. But when my coworkers would bring in a feast on Diwali, it was my favorite time of year.
I can’t find any restaurants that taste even similar to their home cooked meals.
When people complain about vegan diets lacking in x, y, or z I always point out that our diets are culturally balanced, as well as being balanced by the addition of vitamins to staple foods. If we all became deficient in say, iron, we would start fortifying iron in our water, flour, salt, rice etc, while at the same time we would culturally move towards eating more black beans and spinach than we currently do. When an individual removes a food group from their diet, it’s only reasonable that you will have to intentionally rebalance your diet in other places. This isn’t a deficiency inherent in a vegan diet.
If you have to supplement a vitamin or mineral that’s just part of your diet, so don’t @ me with your natural=good nonsense.
The only thing vegans need to supplement with is B12. Everything else can be had from a balanced diet.
Also Vitamin D. You are not doing shit with merely getting sunlight, without having some D2 or D3 in body to breakdown and fuel. That comes from dairy for us Indians.
Once you discover nutritional yeast it’s hard not to get enough B12.
Nooch does not contain B12. It is sometimes added to it, perhaps even often in the US ? but in the EU for example I’ve never ever seen B12-fortified nooch.
Oh really? I didn’t know they made it without. I just checked mine and it says it has >100% of all the b complex vitamins in a serving (2 tbsp). I do live in the US but I got mine online.
Engevita Nutritional Yeast has B12 right on the front of the packaging. It’s the most common brand in the UK. We’re not in the EU anymore sadly but it’s been the most common brand (only brand really) here for well over a decade now.
Depends. Not all nutritional yeast is B12 fortified
Thanks for the warning, didn’t know that was a thing!
If I can’t recreate it in my kitchen with a food processor and a pestle and mortar its too complicated and im not eating it.
American food mentality.
A lot of Indian cooking is vegetarian, not vegan. Ghee is very often used.
Ah man, if I see one more west coast white lady in a YT short explaining their 5min superfood meal prep when we all know there is 0% chance she swallows a single bite of food with that much exotic pepper and ginger…
I’m gonna fry rice and quinoa in Pineapple pulp out of SPITE.
I mean, the United States has, to be fair, developed a food culture that emphasizes using a lot of meat, especially over the past century or so. It’s not surprising that people from an area that eats so much meat, who go vegan, are going to want to look for ways to still make dishes familiar to them
From where I stand internationally though, it seems like a toxic culture too regarding it… Like, apparently, I’m meant to be considered more macho for eating meat somehow… I’m an omnivore, and I’ll eat what I want (the standard of vegetarian food actually seems much higher)
Yep. It’s all about helping people transition. So much of American food culture is centered around burgers, steak, BBQ, etc. It’s really hard to just drop all of that on a dime, even if you want to. These products help people with that mental itch.
Not just the meat, there is cheese and milk involved in a lot of it as well.
It’s not just culture, or itch, or whatever.
I just love the taste of meat! My body craves for it. But if I can keep that delicious flavour in my plate without killing an animal, that’s great!
I think it is also a reason why a lot of vegetarian food options or certain ingredients like tofu in the US are seen as lesser.
Like this isnt a meatless example but how tofu is presented in the west is a good showcase of this disconnect. There are people who dont care for tofu because tofu has been presented to them as a meat fill in. Tofurkey instead of turkey, tofu dog instead of hot dog, tofu nuggest, and etc. And tofu is not meat. It’s tofu. So yeah when you replace a Turkey dinner with tofu and are told its just as good or good enough you start associating it as an inferior tasting meat substitute.
But tofu isnt a meat fill in and in fact many traditional recipes use it in conjunction with meat. Tofu is tofu. It is its own ingredient and recipe,and if you use it as such instead of trying to pretend it’s something else you can do good things.
Like the same goes for a lot of western vegetarian dishes. Instead of leaning into the flavor profile of the dish or digging up some old traditional meatless recipe(of which many exist even western dishes when you consider lent and meatless fridays were a thing traditionally). And dont get me wrong I understand that someone who went vegetarian or vegan may want to emulate a spicy chicken wing, or a burger, but it feels like a lot of the mainstream western options are all just drop in replacements.
But tofu isnt a meat fill in and in fact many traditional recipes use it in conjunction with meat.
My best experiment with tofu to date involved a marinade and replacing half the chicken I would have otherwise used with it in a dish, and cooking it in the drippings from browning the chicken.
Tofu is tofu. It is its own ingredient and recipe,and if you use it as such instead of trying to pretend it’s something else you can do good things.
I’m good with tofu, but my wife HATES the texture of it. Is there some trick to make it less spongy?
Thats a tricky one if they dont like the texture its hard to say. You can maybe make a dish with a less firm tofu thats softer if thats something she’s ok? Maybe do a ma po tofu with rice or something vaguely related.
Have you tried the classic of crispy tofu blocks? Just cube the tofu, toss in cornstarch and fry until the outside is good and crispy. Serve with rice and some kind of sauce or even eat it alone dusted with salt and pepper.
I tried something like that in the oven, with a sort of honey garlic glaze. Crisp outside, but the inside still has that spongy texture she doesn’t like. Maybe if I cut it really fine, into like thin pieces where there’s not much bulk to it, so theres a higher crust:sponge ratio? I hadn’t seen a recipe try really thin pieces, and I just assumed there was a reason.
Try freezing it. Makes the texture a lot different.
Absolutely this. I eat meat, but I really like veg* cooking. I feel like it challenges me in the kitchen and there’s a whole world of veg* dishes especially in mediterranean/middle eastern, south asian and east asian cooking that are just amazing. But the number of wide-eyed vegans who have handed me a lump of some sort of isolated vegetable protein and insisted repeatedly that “it tastes just like meat, you’ll never know” makes me wonder if vegans can actually taste food. I’m sorry, Kaiyleigh, nothing you do to that tofu is gonna make it taste “just like a hot dog”. How about you press it, cube it, roll it in some seasoned corn starch and fry it until it’s a delicious golden brown crunchy little nugget of tofu instead? Let it be what it is rather than trying to force it to be something that it’s not. Either you’re lying to yourself, you’re lying to me or you physically cannot detect flavor compounds with your tongue.
tldr - fuck a vegan, but I’d love another bowl of that lentil dal
I was taught to cook a ton of things growing up.
most of those meals involved meat. So took a bit of relearning. Being able to just make an old thing but with fake meat was nice. Then sometimes brain craves something from child hood, so have to find an alternative.
If its any indication into other factors, every time I try to make butter chicken it ends up tasting like a British persons home made curry recipe so there’s that. Jokes aside as someone who likes cooking, a lot of traditional recipes, of any culture are simply much more labor intensive than slapping a bean patty on a pan then furnishing it. I’d wager the pace of a lot of western lifestyles, the choice gets weighted quickly.
To be fair, a patty sandwich of any type (be it hamburgers, chicken sandwich, beans, or any kind of imitation meat) is going to be similarly labor intensive and time consuming if one had to make the patty and bread oneself rather than being able to just buy them. I’m sure traditional recipes for most cultures can be made similarly convenient if probably somewhat different from their original form, if demand exists for them to be premade and sold that way. There’s a specialty grocery store very close to my home that specializes in Indian food, tho also has some international foods from other places too, and it’s freezer section has all sorts of Indian dishes done up as tv dinners, or premade frozen samosas of various flavors one just has to fry in a pan for a few minutes, among other things.
I mean comparing a frozen vegetable patty to a whole frozen meal is a bit of a stretch in quality and affordability imo. Honestly a lot of it has to do with things like how many pans and utensils you use too. Even if I make a burger from ground beef its still only one pan, two cutting boards (one for meat one for veg) and all the fresh produce just needs to be washed and cut, if you wanna grill the onions, same pan no problem, all you need is a knife and a spatula. When I tried to make butter chicken the tastiest recipe called for two different marinades and a sauce you make in stages. I can go over the video and look at the kitchen hardware necessary but I think it’s easy to imagine its a lot more.
Yup. I love a good microwaved samosa or Chana masala and it’s easier than grilling a frozen chemical burger frankly. I don’t think convenience is a fair argument here. Microwaved Chana is nowhere as good as a freshly made 3hour dish, don’t get me wrong, but there are convenience options that aren’t vegan chicken nuggets.
What does a British person’s home made curry taste like? I’m curious.
Bet it’s for breakfast;-)
Depends on if they’re capitol E English or not, then I’d imagine you’d probably have South Asian and Jamaican styles being dominant. I was referring to the englishmans home cooked take on it. If you want the story, years ago I was in Australia and my neighbors there were UK English, I don’t know how to describe it other than it tasted like my early attempts at traditional recipes. If it helps I remember “Man I did all that and mine still just tastes like someone used a strange ramen flavoring packet.” So that’s probably how I’d describe it.
