Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where we JUST changed the name from “Soy Carne” which was a fun code-switching pun in Spanish, and I refused to let it go entirely because tambien soy tu Soja-Boy, Jon O’Guin, and let me tell you, I am IMMENSELY pleased with both of those lines. If you’re good, and read till the end, I promise I’ll explain them. (or you could Google them and do it yourself.) In any case, today we’re diving into the world of Meat substitutes, aka “things you use instead of meat in recipes that would normally use meat”. That may sound a little…obvious, but to highlight the difference, let’s take our first example.  

CAULIFLOWER

1. A member of the Brassicas we’ve talked about fairly extensively, Cauliflower is mostly used as a meat substitute in breaded applications: Cauliflower “chicken nuggets” and so on, since well-cooked cauliflower doesn’t easily form a “skin” like many meat. Even our cauliflower ‘steaks’ used a breadcrumb exterior for texture.

2. Compare to our Charred Cauliflower recipe from earlier in the month, where the Cauliflower isn’t standing IN for a meat, it’s just straight up the star of the show: the huge head of seasoned cauliflower isn’t supposed to resemble meat, it’s just supposed to be filling and satisfying on its own merits. Or, “as filling and satisfying as it can be”: as we might get into with some of the later options, there are some in the vegan community who are against the idea of relying on vegetables as the centerpieces of meat substitution recipes, because vegetables are low in protein, which is a big component of satiety: if you eat 6 ounces of steak, and 6 ounces of steamed cauliflower, you’re probably going to get hungry again sooner off of the cauliflower. (Vegetarians can manipulate this with dairy, which has a lot of fat and protein, but Vegans need to rely on other methods.)  

3. A type of Ear.

SO that’s a basic little breakdown of what we mean, so let’s dive in.

CHICKPEAS

Chickpeas, as a legume, avoid some of that ‘low-protein’ issue from earlier, and that’s allowed them to be incorporated into a variety of meat substitutes. The easiest of these is “let’s use falafel (fried balls of chickpea or fava bean dough) instead of meat-balls”. Indeed, you could argue that falafel’s popularity in Israel is due to its role as a meat substitute: falafel is pareve, a Jewish word for “neither meat nor dairy”(literally meaning “neutral”), since Kashrut forbids having the same vessel contain both meat and dairy, thus at meals where you want to consume dairy, you can replace the meat with falafel, and be following the rules.

Chickpeas are also used in “Burmese Tofu”, a product made in Burma (thankfully) which consists of chickpea flour (or just processed chickpeas) being cooked and mixed to ‘set’ into a sliceable yellow brick, that is then shaved, chopped, and otherwise treated like Tofu: you want it deep-fried? Done. You want it in curry? Fine.

Looks like scrambled eggs (back) and home fries (front) here.

COCONUT

Coconut I wasn’t going to include on here, but apparently is useful in Southeast Asia in particular, where coconut meat or pulp is used to substitute for meat in several applications. The Philippines, for instance, make coconut burgers out of the pulp left-over after pressing for coconut milk. That’s just enough to make me not feel bad for also bringing it up because it’s also been used as a bacon replacement. (turns out “meaty, crunchy vegetable”, properly seasoned, is a pretty good approximation of “smoky crunchy meat”) Are there other ways to have it replicate meat? Probably, but I don’t know them. I really just wanted to talk about coconut bacon, and the Philippines (man, it’s really one L, three Ps? I don’t like that for some reason.) let me sneak in the bit about coconut burgers to justify it. Logically, If it can be made to replicate burgers, it can be made to replicate other meats, but I’d need to try it before I could suggest what. Meatballs, probably. …Man, the idea of like, a spicy curry spaghetti with coconut meatballs sounds rad as hell if that works. The kind of pasta you’d serve Moana’s dad to get him to like you.

EGGPLANT

Another one that wasn’t going to be on the list, until literally this morning, I discovered it was at the heart of some vegan meat substitutes and TikTok drama, meaning it is perfect for the moment.  So let us interrupt this Culinary Compendium to bring you breaking Vegan News…or at least, Ve-gossip:

I mentioned on Monday that TikTok, due to its longer time, has more recipes and like, person-to-person political messaging. One interesting voice in that regard was “That Vegan Teacher”, a vegan woman who made like, little songs about being vegan, and who was surprisingly controversial. We’re talking “I will no longer be an organ donor in case I save the life of a meat-eater”, “I’m going to take ‘I Can’t Breathe’ and make it about the animal industry”, “Coming out as LGBTQ is inherently selfish, unlike coming out as vegan”, and “Let’s make a video arguing it’s wrong to ban hurtful speech, and demonstrate that point by labeling a Black girl doll as “Naturally Intelligent, Gorgeous, Generous, Exemplary, and Radiant”…using those words to form an acrostic (lining them all up so that the shared line of letters spell out something)…to spell out N-I-G…you can work out the rest.

Anywho, so THAT person (who has since been banned from TikTok for having a bunch of videos that are similarly inflammatory) made a video specifically calling out Gordon Ramsey.

Who no doubt took it with his usual decorum and grace.

She did so because Ramsey is actually fairly popular on TikTok: he uses the Duet function to criticize/react to people’s food/recipes, like he’s famous for doing in his shows, and he’s been doing on his various social media for years. (Not always negatively: he’s been known to compliment good-looking dishes, and/or to use the opportunity to talk about environmental issues). So she made a video specifically calling him out and saying eating meat is immoral, which he responded to by laughing at the song, and eating a burger as she sang, which pissed off a fair bit of the Vegan community. (In their defense: If I made a video telling you beating your children is immoral, and your response was to make a video where you backhanded your kid in response…it’s kind of obvious that’s a bad counter argument, right?) This fed into a weird situation where Ramsey is kind of famous for being something of a dick to vegans/vegetarians, with at least one recorded instance of him directly lying to a vegetarian associate about what was on a pizza to trick them into eating meat, and has only reluctantly been embracing it for the last couple years: one of his restaurants did a Veganuary menu in 2019, if you go on his website, he only has THREE Vegan recipes, which are: a snack mix of nuts, marinara sauce, and a smoothie. So it was kind of a “bad on bad” fight, and it allowed people to start a discussion about Gordon’s previous actions to the vegan community.

Anywho, about a week ago, he put out a video saying he’s going vegan, and makes a Vegan Eggplant “Steak”. Which, as one responder points out: we never see HIM make it, nor anyone eat it. (indeed, the directions could have easily been pieced together via soundboard: just have Gordon spend a day recording a bunch of generic cooking/food words, and you can have him narrate recipes made by someone who works for him by proxy.) Two vegan YouTubers have since made the dish: one ends up saying “it tastes very nice, the rub and sauce have great flavor…but this won’t convince ANYONE that it’s steak. Like, just call don’t call it a steak.” The second accidentally overcooks hers, so her eggplant is mushy, but comes to roughly the same conclusion: The rub and sauce is good, but…just put this on seitan or tofu if you really want to copy meat. The eggplant is an unnecessary flourish that makes the dish slightly less believable.

It’s a great LOOK, but once you cut into it, it’s just eggplant.

The Ramsey video also concludes that he’s going vegan “for lunch only”, which might mean this lunch, or lunches in the future, or that his restaurants are going to start having vegan lunch menus, who knows. This has been a surprising confusing and villainy-filled segment of “Vegan News”

Despite it not being used to best effect here, Eggplant does have a fairly robust presence in vegan meat substitutes. Hell, Chicken Parmigiana is actually a VEG-substitute recipe for Eggplant parmigiana from Italy. Eggplant is used in vegan sausage mixes, it can ALSO be made into “bacon”, used to make Meatballs, Bolognese, pulled “pork”, it just doesn’t work as STEAK because it’s too soft. Speaking of Pulled Pork…

JACKFRUIT

Potentially the first meat substitute we made on the site, Jackfruit, due to its fibrous nature, has been a go-to vegetable for plenty of dishes in South and Southeast Asian preparation, often filling the same role as meat might. (ie, a curry with chunks of simmered jackfruit, or as the hearty vegetable in a stew.), which has led to it being embraced in America as a meat substitute, particularly for pulled pork (since the natural mild sweetness of Jackfruit is most easily hidden in a sweet pulled-pork style preparation.

MUSHROOMS

I’m not going to lie to you: I had a big plate of pancakes for breakfast, and between that and the sudden discovery of the eggplant rabbit-hole, my energy level has PLUMMETED. So do you really need me to explain mushrooms being used as meat substitutes? I mean, c’mon, I remember Portobello burgers where you replaced the burger patty with a mushy fatty (that rhyme was NOT worth it) like, 15-20 years ago. If you told me they were first invented in California in the 70’s, I would completely buy that. Minced mushrooms have subbed for meat in sauces plenty of times…they’re chewy, umami, you can’t overcook them, and they’re cheap.

NUT LOAF/ROAST

This one’s a little more complicated: Basically, you got to remember that Britain still has something of a hard-on for the “roast dinner”: the big dinner with meat, potatoes, rolls (or Yorkshire puddings over there), veggies, etc. Classic Sunday pot roast sort of fare, though the Brits would tend to use roast beef, or, recently/more frugally, roast chicken. Personally, and this may sound mildly unpatriotic of me, but I blame the ever-crushing grind of American capitalism for its waning presence in America: you think about it, and the tradition kind of started dying off in the 80’s, through to now, yeah? About the time unions started getting busted, wages to productivity started falling, all that jazz. No one’s relaxed enough on a Sunday anymore to say “You know what, I think I’ve got time for a 3 hour dinner prep.” But maybe that’s my snowflake leftie voice speaking. (or the fact that my parents are/were workaholics causing me to project) Back to the meat at hand:

It’s actually kind of unfair to make that previous comparison, because Britain’s always been more about it than we have, and thus, as vegetarianism started catching on, it had to find a solution for that faster. Like, “nut roasts” (a mixture of nuts, legumes and veggies meant to replicate/stand-in for the big hearty slices of beef of a Sunday roast) first showed up in British cookbooks in 1910, and have only gotten more accepted and prominent. They were, basically, “veggie burgers” before people knew what burgers were. You CAN get them over here (typically as a “oh, here’s something for the vegans for Thanksgiving/Christmas”), so if you find them…You know, make your own call.

I’m not going to lie, you could tell me this was banana bread, and there’d be a second where I believed you.

Personally, one of my favorite vegetable burgers is a pecan-based patty they sell at Finnriver, so it wouldn’t be hard to convince me to try one, but whether it works for you is up to personal experience.

PANEER

Paneer is cheese, and is therefore a terrible VEGAN meat substitute, but Vegans are the only ones who need meat replaced, now are they? Vegetarians want entrees too! Paneer specifically is an Indian cheese kind of similar to Halloumi, in that it doesn’t melt under heat, so it’s used as a meat-replacement in many curries, most famously saag paneer, with saag being green vegetables (such as spinach, mustard greens, etc), which are frequently made into a spiced sauce/serving platform. Think of like, “on a bed of creamed spinach”, and you’ve got the idea.

PEA PROTEIN

I really just want to highlight these guys because Pea Protein is quickly lunging to fill in the “I want crunchy/crispy fried stuff” for health-conscious/vegan shoppers. You want “pork rinds” without any pig? Probably pea protein. You want vegan Cheetos? They’re called Pea-tos. Pea Protein is party of what makes Beyond Burgers. It’s a growing resource for vegan food options. I personally tried some “Pigless Pork Rinds”, and the results are pretty close (though I will note that of the two I tried, the “spicy” was far less impressive/convincing: the Barbecue could rely on some of the sweet and smoky flavor to cover, but when going for pure heat, the lack of fatty oils to bounce off of muted the result, and left you very aware of the texture and relative blandness of the pea-protein crisps.

SEITAN

We just talked all about it on Monday, so you already know, but to briefly recap: Seitan is a trendy name for wheat gluten, which can be formed into a meat substitute, with different levels of kneading/twisting causing it to replicate different meats. You can also get it as “mock duck”, a Chinese preparation that gets one side of the seitan pricked up like plucked duck skin, seasons it with soy sauce and MSG, and fries it to make vegetarian “mock duck”.

“Fake Duck in a Can” in one of those sentences that feels like a parody of commercialism and capitalism.

TEMPEH

Tempeh is basically Indonesia’s version of tofu/miso (tofu in that it is fermented beans forming a curd, miso in that it technically can be made with a variety of products in various flavors.) It’s less processed than tofu, often leaving chunks of bean (or other thickeners), and tends to have a more pronounced flavor, as well as more protein and fiber. You can crumble it up to get a ground-beef-like texture, or cut it into strips, season it, and fry it for bacon.

TOFU

Tofu has the dubious distinction of being the go-to for many people when they imagine a meat substitute, often in the context of “it’s just not the same”. Which is a valid complaint, and something of a “duh” moment. Like, yeah, you can’t just take normal tofu, bread it, and pretend it’s chicken. You have to work to make it convincing. Draining, pressing, marinating. Apparently freezing and thawing can help it get a meatier texture. But it’s an important ingredient because when properly executed it can fill some of the cravings for meat. (I love ordering fried tofu from Thai restaurants not because I think it’s chicken nuggets, but because it fulfills a lot of the same desires while being marginally healthier.)  

TVP

You might see this word bouncing around, and if you don’t know what it is, it’s “Textured Vegetable Protein”, and it is…essentially dehydrated soy flakes. By reconstituting it, you can turn it into something that has a texture very comparable to ground meat, so it can be seasoned and shaped to replicate various meats. Interestingly, you can also use it as a very cheap meat EXTENDER: if cooked in a pan with meat, the TVP (or TSP, TVP is a trademarked name) will absorb the juices of the meat, allowing you to get more “meat” for less money.

Don’t these burgers look pretty normal? Surprise! They’re actually ALL TVP.
You down with TVP? Yeah well you know me!

And those are the big Meat Substitutes on the market these days, in terms of raw ingredients/products: specific companies will have mixes of some or all of these, along with other flavor compounds or textural elements in order to achieve the flavor and texture they prefer. Sausages made of eggplant and gluten, burgers made of beans and pea powder, etc. It’s worth checking out, if you’ve got the time (and you know, aren’t allergic to both gluten and soy. If those mess you up, not a lot of usable list here.)

NOW, since you’ve presumably been good, and made it all the way to the bottom, for the Spanish pun translations. “Soy Carne” means “I am meat” in Spanish, with the obvious fun of it also being “soy meat”. “Tambien soy tu Soja-Boy” means “Also, I am your soy-boy”, with a minor joke that Soja-Boy looks like Soulja Boy, and the humor (on my end) of self-identifying as a “soy boy”, a right-wing insult for left-leaning men, meant to imply/assert that consumption of soy products has made them weak and feminine. (which is a weird arc of a dumb belief from “A crackpot asserted it on YouTube, based on how sheep eating red clover had some medical effects due to the high number of phytoestrogens they were consuming, and you know, soy also has phytoestrogens, and if you consume too much of it (like, multiple quarts of soy milk per day) it can cause your mammaries to grow, which bodybuilders discovered because they were drinking multiple quarts of soy protein shakes a day.) It’s the newer, dumber version of “beta males”…which is also a dumb belief, since even the guy who ‘discovered’ Alpha males in wolves later realized he was wrong: It turns out Wolves only create Alpha-Beta hierarchies in captivity, when separated from their families. It’s the equivalent of only watching a maximum security prison, and proposing that ALL human society is built on a cigarette economy.

MONDAY: JON MAKES STIRFRY, WITH A FLAVOR COMBINATION THAT FEELS WEIRD, BUT REALLY ISN’T. EGGS AND TOMATOES.

THURSDAY: JON PROBABLY CONSTRUCTS SOME SORT OF ELABORATE RUSE.