AKICOLJ (cooking question edition)
Feb. 4th, 2010 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksTonight 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.
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.
