Big Vegan: More than 350 Recipes, No Meat/No Dairy All Delicious

1087 Pages·2011·4.15 MB·English

by  Robin Asbell

BIG VEGAN

MORE THAN 350 RECIPES
NO MEAT / NO DAIRY
ALL DELICIOUS
PHOTOGRAPHS BY KATE SEARS
by Robin Asbell
Copyright
Text copyright © 2011 by Robin Asbell.
Photographs copyright © 2011 by Kate Sears.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.
ISBN 978-0-8118-7467-0
Chronicle Books
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank my sweetheart, Stan, for accompanying me on this and
all my journeys. As always, my family and friends were a source of joy
and support in the work of making this book.
My agent, Jennifer Griffin, was invaluable as an editor, advisor, and hand-
holder, and I am truly grateful. All the wonderful people at Chronicle
Books made the process fun and contributed to the final product in ways
great and small. Special thanks to Bill LeBlond, Amy Treadwell, Doug
Ogan, Alice Chau, Tera Killip, Peter Perez, and David Hawk, who brought
the book to life.
My recipe testers—Lisa Genis, Crystal Grobe, Marge Porter, Liz Nerud,
Joy Harris, Jane Gordon, and Kristine Vick—gave me invaluable
feedback, and I can’t thank them enough. Special thanks go to Deanne
Klevander, for volunteering her very sharp eyes and organized mind.
A collection of my colleagues also contributed to this project, with wit,
advice, and support: Sandra Gutierrez, for Guatemalan recipe advice and
more; Zoe Francois and Jeff Hertzberg, for their bread techniques; Tara
M. Desmond, for support and almost-vegetarian things; Antonia Allegra,
for constant inspiration; Jill O’Connor, Nancie McDermott, Cheryl
Sternman Rule, and my IACP friends, for keeping me laughing—a very
valuable thing.
I am also grateful for all the wonderful cooking schools that have hosted
my cooking classes and helped me get real food to the people.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction to the Vegan World
CHAPTER 1 Pantry Staples
CHAPTER 2 Breakfast
CHAPTER 3 Breads
CHAPTER 4 Sauces and Condiments
CHAPTER 5 Appetizers and Snacks
CHAPTER 6 Salads
CHAPTER 7 Soups
CHAPTER 8 Side Dishes
CHAPTER 9 Main Courses
CHAPTER 10 Grilling
CHAPTER 11 Desserts
Resources
Ingredients Glossary
Index
About the Author
Introduction to the Vegan World
Vegan is getting bigger all the time, so welcome to the party!
Some of you may be committed, long-time vegans, and some of you may
just be starting to investigate this way of eating. Some of you may just
want some great plant-based recipes to help you cut back on animal
foods. You are all welcome, and there should be something for everyone
in this book. Eating great foods that just happen to be animal-free is good
for your health, good for the environment, and good for the animals, so
every time someone chooses vegan, we all win. With even just one
plateful, clean plant-based food makes a difference.
Eating this way is a celebration—a celebration of you nourishing yourself
while reveling in the sensuous cuisine that springs from a nourished
planet. It’s a celebration of the colors, tastes, scents, and textures that
emerge from the soil and all the energy they possess. Feeling great,
looking good, and doing good for the planet is just one big party, with no
hangover the next day. As much as we look to food for pleasure, the
ultimate hedonism is great health. Sure, junk food has its fleeting buzz,
but living in a nourished body is a long-term plan for serious fun. Who
doesn’t want to have more energy and avoid chronic disease? The most
powerful tool for accomplishing a vibrant state of being is your plate.
The plant-based food party is coming into its own place in the world.
Good food is good food, transcending labels. Anyone who has ever eaten
a crispy-hot slice of hearty bread spread with melting peanut butter and
jam for lunch was enjoying a vegan meal with no label attached. Sublime
pleasures like a perfect, ripe peach; a just-picked juicy tomato still warm
from the sun; or a handful of crisp pistachios come from plant cuisine at
its most basic. Hand those over to creative chefs, and a whole world of
flavors and textures begs to be explored. Many of the most respected
culinary minds, including Thomas Keller and Charlie Trotter, now explore
plant-based cuisine in their world-famous restaurants. Making amazing
food from pure, simple ingredients gives them a chance to show that they
really understand food. Working without animal products makes them
stretch, drop old ways of thinking, and work a little harder to produce
something that people will pay top dollar to experience. And, like me,
they look to the history and the ancient traditions of eating low on the
food chain. We have come full circle.
Eating well has always involved plants. Every great cuisine of the world
has dishes that revel in the textures and flavors of vegetables, fruits,
nuts, beans, and good oils. Peasants ate this way out of poverty—the
cucina povera of Italy is the source of some of the most robust, decadent,
animal-free dishes on the planet. Every country that touches the
Mediterranean Sea has its own form of vegetable worship—from Spanish
romesco to Greek hortika in olive oil to Lebanese hummus and Syrian
eggplant in pomegranate molasses. The Mediterranean diet, that lifelong
prescription for pleasure and health, goes vegan without skipping a beat.
The real Mediterranean diet was flexitarian before we had a word for it.
Hardscrabble living consisted of eating things you could grow most of the
time, since eating animals was expensive. Luckily, one of their native
plants was the olive, so they could drench their healthful food in its
richness and in the process, create a life-saving cuisine that we aspire to
today. Wine, plant foods, and song—how can you go wrong?
Looking to the East, we see the influences of Buddhism and other
peaceful philosophies have planted seeds for plant-loving cuisines that
flourish to this day. In the traditional Chinese kitchen, we find
masterpieces made from plants. Can you imagine a world with no soy
sauce? There must be a bottle of that simple, fermented black elixir in
every kitchen in the world by now. Like the Mediterranean way, traditional
diets all over Asia are plant-based—a little bit of animal, stretched across
an expanse of rice and a crisp-tender jumble of stir-fried vegetables, or
perhaps simmered into a miso soup with the best vegetables available for
the season. It’s easy to go vegan with such a plant-filled plate. A few
thousand years ago, China turned away from dairy foods. It’s unclear
whether it was to differentiate from the Mongol herders, or perhaps an
emperor was secretly lactose intolerant. Either way, one of the world’s
most ancient civilizations has been making magic without dairy for quite
awhile, and we still reap the benefits. Tofu is also attributed to the
Chinese, so tip a hat to those soybean alchemists.
More tropical Asian cultures, like Thailand, Malaysia, and the Pacific Rim,
bring us light, plant-based food born of sizzling heat and tropical plants.
Coconut milk and chiles, exotic spices, and fermented beans make a
light, summery meal taste rich and satisfying. In tropical climates,
everybody wants to eat foods that won’t weigh them down—and vegans
like that feeling, too. How sexy is a rich coconut sauce, spiked with heat
and spice, punched up with touches of sweet and sour, flecked with fresh
herbs? You could put it on anything and it would sing, but it really speaks
when gentle plants hold it high.
India, where vegetarian traditions are strong to this day, has much to
teach us about making satisfying plant cuisine. After a few thousand
years, they have worked out complex spice and flavor balances that
elevate the simplest potato to gourmet fare. Dal and rice are the national
dish, and variations are endless. We can borrow many of their classic,
time-tested cooking techniques and combinations, and work around their
yogurt and cheese. A symphony of spice, a subtle play between soft and
crisp, a teasing touch of sweet, then a hint of sour—the experience in a
mouthful of curry is so intense that it needs only simple plants to carry it.
As much as we depend on Europe and Asia, we can also travel the
globe, discovering the creative ways in which cooks prepare plant foods.
South America, with its amazing quinoa, amaranth, rice, and corn, and
the home of the chile and so many varieties of beans, has a vast treasure
trove of plant dishes. Many islands, from Jamaica to Hawaii, are home to
tropical flavors, many based on abundant fruits and vegetables that soak
up that sunshine and heat. Jamaica even has its own vegan religion, the
Rastafarians, who happily simmer up the fruits of the island with coconut
and callaloo.
The melting pot of our global kitchen brings us exciting access to the
dishes of far-flung islands and faraway steppes. This is the great vegan
harvest. The down-to-earth foods that people have made from plants for
years build the base of our cuisine. Don’t be fooled by restaurant fare.
When you eat in a restaurant that serves another country’s food, you
usually get the celebration food, the meat dish they only serve on feast
days, the richest, sweetest things that are meant to seduce you. In
everyday life, there have to be plant-based, inexpensive foods. Look to
the old ways, the agrarian traditions, and there you will see how that
culture expresses its love of plants. Learn from it; take it home.
The vegan way of life is also about fusing global tastes with local foods,
to keep our carbon footprint as small as possible. Vegans are cutting
edge in that regard, in the food world. I attended a panel discussion
featuring Elizabeth Andoh, a Japanese food expert and anthropologist;
Rick Bayless, Mexican food expert; and Vikram Vij, an Indian chef
running a wildly popular Indian restaurant in Canada. The topic was
which was more authentic, importing the foods of the homeland for each
immigrant population, or applying the cooking style and flavors of a
cuisine to the fresh, local foods? While the whole notion of authenticity is
always changing, all agreed that the true expression of a cuisine involves
using the best indigenous foods, even if they did not exist in a recipe’s
homeland. While vegan food was the last thing they thought they were
discussing, I think that adapting foods of the world to plant-based dishes,
and even using local, nontraditional substitutions, results in a vibrant new
cuisine. Food culture is always evolving, and evolving away from animal
agriculture and Big Food is the way of the future.