AKICOLJ (cooking question edition)

[rushthatspeaks]

Tonight I made tarkari momos, with a roasted-tomato mint sauce. It was awesome! I made cheese, and I made the dumpling wrappers and filling, and then wrapped and steamed the dumplings, and made sauce, and it was really really good. It's about four hours steady work, including making the cheese.

Anyway, this recipe was out of Andrea Nguyen's Asian Dumplings, a cookbook that I occasionally actually cuddle. It is so good at describing every part of the dumpling process that it's genuinely pretty easy, and it has dumplings from regions I don't usually see cookbooks cover, such as Mongolian buuz and Filipino lumpia.

But. As of today, I have now made two of the three savory vegetarian recipes in it. I am almost always cooking for Ruth, and so need to have a vegetarian option. Dumplings are enough work that making two completely separate fillings bumps them into unmanageable; I can handle making the same filling with the same spicing in two pots and having one of the pots have fake meat, but I can't handle, say, making pork-cabbage potstickers and spinach-cheese potstickers at the same time. I'm going to deal with part of this by making a lot of tarkari momos and freezing them for Ruth to have the next time I want to try a meat recipe, but really what I want to do is substitute fake meat into half-batches of my fillings.

The problem is, there are two major types of animal product found in the dumpling recipes:

one, fatty ground meat (pork, beef, or lamb depending). The recipes say quite clearly that it's important to have as much fat in the grind as possible, because the rendered fat is what draws out the flavor of the spices and, when the filling cools slightly, holds the filling together. Every fake meat I've ever used has tended towards dry, sometimes ludicrously dry. How should I substitute for fatty meat? (Our subletter T. suggests fake meat and some quantity of vegetable shortening, but I am uncertain of his judgment about cooking, based on recent experience.)

two, shrimp. There are vegetarian substitutes for ordinary shrimp, I know that. I've seen them in the store. I've never used any. If anyone has, I'd appreciate recommendations as I have not eaten shrimp in years either, subsequent to Thrud's Shrimp Lecture: Ocean Sustainability And You, which she gives anyone she knows who eats shrimp, and then they don't. But are there vegetarian substitutes for dried shrimp? Dried shrimp is a very different matter.

The thing is, Ruth can't eat chilis or cilantro, either. So if I have a dumpling filling containing ground fatty pork mixed with lamb, shredded cabbage, and caraway seeds, flavored with dried shrimp broth, garlic, ginger, cayenne and a roasted pureed chili, and I take out everything she can't eat, I am left with lightly spiced cabbage, which seems rather sad. It is therefore quite important to me to have good substitutes for the meat and shrimp, as I'm already bending these recipes to get chili and cilantro out of them and still leave full flavor. (Fresh mint. Parsley. Roasted mustard seed. Black pepper. Paprika. The chili-cilantro substitutions I can manage.) Working around meat, shrimp, and chili without good fakes means I am ignoring more than two-thirds of the ingredients and might as well not pretend to be making the same dish. See above re: cannot deal with two entirely separate fillings on the same night. So any help will be greatly appreciated.

Triple extra bonus points for vegan substitutions-- in an ideal world I'd have a vegetarian and vegan recipe version for each dumpling.

Comments

[jinian.livejournal.com]

(1) You are a cooking badass.

(2) Darn, I was about to suggest eggs to go in the filling for the fatty/cohesive nature.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Thank you! And eggs are a good idea, actually-- Ruth isn't a vegan, so I can feed them to her; I have a couple of friends who are vegans who want to have a dumpling party sometime, but on a day-to-day basis I can use eggs.

[sovay]

The thing is, Ruth can't eat chilis or cilantro, either.

I didn't realize she was also allergic to cilantro. That's important to know. Thank you.

(I have no suggestions for meat replacement. I don't think I'd use fake meat and vegetable shortening, although if you had something suitably proteinaceous and lipid to substitute for the shortening, the fake meat might work. In dumplings, I think olive oil is not it. Coconut is probably too distinctively flavored. I'll get back to you.)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

It's not an allergy to cilantro, she's just one of those people who has that gene that makes it taste like soap. It won't make her sick, but she intensely dislikes it.

Coconut might work in a couple of these recipes, mostly the Filipino ones, but definitely not in most of them.

[selidor]

Taro, perhaps? In my mind it seems to have the right texture. Would go nicely with the spiced cabbage.

[khyros.livejournal.com]

Texturized Vegetable Protein (TVP) as a meat substitute can be awesome.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

But dry and utterly lacking in fat.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I've had this problem, and I have no solution for it. Do not use TVP. Do not use tofu. Quorn + butter might possibly work but isn't actually vegetarian.

I have some good vegetarian dumpling fillings if you want suggestions, but they're not very Asian.

The other suggestion is that any sumpling filling can be a vol-au-vent filling, and vol-au-vents are a lot easier to make in batches of different kinds.

But I think freezing vegetarians ones is the way to go.

[angstnokami.livejournal.com]

Mushrooms cooked in oil beforehand? I have no idea if this would work, just vaguely flailing.

[loligo.livejournal.com]

Vegetarian sausages are sometimes fattier than other veggie meat substitutes, so that might help, depending on the brand and the recipe. But my mom has tried many vegetarian fillings for Latvian dumplings (including veggie sausage) to accommodate my husband, and the only one that has turned out to be as satisfying as the fatty ham and bacon filling is the cabbage, dill, and hard-boiled egg filling. So I vote for eggs.

(Although I note that my favorite brand of pierogies includes some shortening in their mushroom & sauerkraut version, while it does not appear anywhere else in their product line. So maybe the shortening idea isn't completely crazy?)

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

I second the vegetarian sausages suggestion. Wish I could be more helpful in suggesting a fake meat, but I don't often cook with it. I do remember that you can buy a sausage-filling mixture which is basically a plastic tube of mushy, wet vegetable protein. It's much wetter and gooier than the texturized veg. protein that's sold as the equivalent of hamburger. You can squash lumps of the fake sausage filling and fry it, turning it into the equivalent of sausage patties, or you can mix it into stews like chili, where it pretends to be ground beef. It might taste decent in dumplings.

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

I've used the sausage filling in dumplings many time -- it's excellent. It's still pretty low in fat, though, so I don't know if it would work for this particular recipe.

[pameladean]

There's a one of those called Gimme Lean. I have made buns (that is, whole-wheat bready stuff filled with mock sausage) with it; I fried it in a fairly generous amount of olive oil and added seasonings first, since it seemed to me to lack both spice and sage. But I don't know if it would work the same way in a thin dumpling skin. Its texture is much superior to ordinary TVP's, though.

Yves used to make some amazing mock sausages, but I haven't seen them recently.

P.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

That's the one! Gimme Lean is good stuff.

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

I might recommend mushrooms cooked in some sort of fat...it wouldn't be the *same*, but you'd get that savoriness, a nice texture, and oil to absorb the seasonings.

Or maybe soaked coarsely ground almonds/other nuts? You'd end up with sort of Tibetan-Persian fusion food, but it might be really tasty and would satisfy the "fatty savory protein" requirement.

(Also, if you want to treat yourself to shrimp before you leave the New England area, the Maine coldwater shrimps are now in season and are not harvested by the "scoop up ocean floor, remove shrimp" method. Though there's still some debate on whether the population is healthy.)

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard of mock shrimp before. Googling turned up May Wah (yeah, the URL doesn't match the name), but I have no idea how good there stuff is. Still, it might be worth asking them about mock dried shrimp.

I haven't actually read food_porn in years, but you might try asking there.

One random idea is to take dried shitake mushrooms, soften them in hot water (or soup stock?), squeeze out the liquid, cut them up, and then marinate them. I don't know what to marinate them in to imitate shrimp, but I do know that when my mother marinates them in soy, sugar, and sesame oil, they are quite tasty.

Right product but not too useful

[marchharetay.livejournal.com]

The May Wah company makes the fake meats the veggie restaurants cook w/ in NY & they conform really well re: cooking. I absolutely love the stuff. They don't seem to sell in Boston, but have been there for a Veg Fest, etc. You might want to keep your eyes open for their products in health food stores, etc...fantastic stuff.

http://www.vegieworld.com/index.asp