Tim Holloway wrote:I'm in the RBC (Reduced Body Count) camp, myself. If I ever had to slaughter my own, it would be meat-free forever. Although that's partly because I don't care for fowl. Roasting's too good for Canada Geese. Bastards.
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I don't like "vegan" recipes. There are plenty of traditional recipes that are inherently vegan, but when you start swapping in weird substitutes, I walk away. Ironically, though, I don't care for tofu because to me it's too much like chicken and I don't like chicken.
I just nodded at the other stuff, because it is all either obviously well-thought-out, subjective, or both.
But there is an entire world of tofu preparation and cookery, from about a century to most probably more than 2000 years old, that has literally spread around the globe over millennia.
There are many non-vegetarians, as well as vegans, that if upscale would be likely to order tofu dishes at mixed restaurants that can be among the pricier ones...
So while a fair number of chefs aiming at middle-class, generically cosmopolitan clientele will likely be largely preparing it to "taste like chicken" for people ordering it on their way to a Cardi B concert, thinking of that as archetypical in tofu cuisine would be at risk of extrapolating centuries of experience, which we do have historical and ethnographic data for, from work that is likely targeting someone who would be ordering food at Disney World.
Tho, now that it has come up to this degree, first I have to say that I meant food you'd get at stands there, not the fancier sit-down restaurants, and while I was thinking of that I remembered I don't even think THAT is true any more:
When I first went to Disney World as a vegan, I was angry and sad. They had a few odd vegan things here and there but they often weren't any good. The fancier restaurants would always at least make you what the vegan cast members would eat when they were there, even if it wasn't on any printed menu, and were generally really good. But most people would never see that, they would just try something at one of the fast to-go walk-ups, and if it really sucked, would decide they had "tried vegan food, it was awful" for like the next five years. Until totally randomly by the luck of the draw, something that was really good that happened to be vegan happened to fall into their mouth...
But the things they have added in the past ten years or so, I couldn't replace myself with something more likely to make someone decide "I tried some vegan food at Disney World, it was really good -- maybe I should be more open to it if someone is asking me to go somewhere I might have to eat vegan food, I guess, instead of saying no before they finish the sentence..."
So I started out there disappointed/frustrated, saw years of slow, discontinuous then more increasingly continuous improvement...
and wound up getting somewhere like this:
https://wdwnt.com/2019/10/review-new-ronto-less-garden-wrap-featuring-impossible-sausage-adds-vegan-option-to-ronto-roasters-at-star-wars-galaxys-edge-in-disneyland/
So, sorry Disney World -- I meant that you are trying to cater to a mainstream audience rather than that you do a poor job -- there have been too many great additions to count.
So...tofu...I have been in Vietnamese Groceries (larger, fully-featured ones), that probably had 12 kinds of tofu on tap, maybe at most of 8 of which I could eat as a vegetarian and 4 or 5 not..
I don't think more than 2 or 3 of those would "taste like chicken" any more than the jokes go about how everything and everyone "tastes like chicken"...
Since people here seem to appreciate works considered as Great Classics, these books taught a lot of crash courses in food history to a lot of people:
https://www.soyinfocenter.com/books-popular.php
There's a lot of newer books. I probably have half a dozen of them that I haven't even read because my wife sees 60% recipes by volume in the text and they get filed with her cookbooks...
I don't like "vegan" recipes. There are plenty of traditional recipes that are inherently vegan, but when you start swapping in weird substitutes, I walk away.
Perhaps Design
Patterns would be more appropriate than recipes, but just as there might be some natural ways to implement a Design Pattern in some languages that would look very different in others -- there are large collections of recipes that are really just implementing a Vegan adapter interface to food styles that people likely to be reading the books think of as "normal food". The healthiest food they could possibly eat might more likely look nothing like what they think of as "normal food", that might be an eventual target, but when you see these things they are often again trying to bridge gaps between existing historical vegan-compatible food culture and where people are at, which could be "You know where they have great food?? State fairs!" -- wait, I think that is an actual example from real life...it was meant to be a joke, but I think it's been done...
So lots of people in certain cultures regularly ate Jackfruit in a "meaty" paradigm for a much longer time than the US has been its own country...it started becoming readily available here relatively recently -- it can be used in 15 ways for sure, but the people they are hoping to sell it to have no idea how...
how do we bridge that gap? Lots of "Jackfruit recipes" aimed at people who never saw jackfruit before, but they generally would be called "vegan recipes" by me.
Admittedly, that is similar to "tofu" or "tempeh" or "miso" as a category almost...I feel like most people are likely to be looking for actual recipes rather than design patterns when buying more mainstream cookbooks...a lot of the better recipes are probably going to be presented in, or at least originate as code samples in relatively rarer vegan design patterns books...
I will read dozens of pages of text barely broken once in a while by a simple diagram or line drawing or low-res black-and-white photo.
So I re-read and realized what triggered me to write all this.
I don't like "vegan" recipes. There are plenty of traditional recipes that are inherently vegan, but when you start swapping in weird substitutes, I walk away.
traditional recipes that were inherently vegan are still very traditional to someone preparing them because that's how her grandma taught her grandma to make them...are weird swaps for people from other cultures.
A tremendous percentage of the scores of food-related books I have seek to adapt traditional knowledge and experience to the food lives of people buying american-unit or metric cookbooks written in English. It is probably easily more than half of the books that I own with any food in them. The ones covering the parts of the world where tofu was a thing generally feature it, some other don't.
It undermines my position, but of uncountably dozens of different tofu dishes I have eaten from around the globe, one of my favorites admittedly is
Jerk Tofu. There was a mixed Jamaican place near my workplace years ago, that made a Jerk Tofu with a side of rice and peas that was good enough to have me near tears more often than not. My friends would drag me in there on days we were especially down, low-energy or frustrated, it was that good.
I never thought of the tofu as "tasting like chicken" in that dish, but admittedly most people hearing me order it would be thinking "you mean jerk chicken, right?" so that happens to be one dish where the whole preparation of the dish, and the selection of the tofu, was optimized to create a "Jerk Tofu Experience" that would be familiar to those just trying to find the best Jerk Chicken in the business-district-accessible parts of the city...
I've had several others that I would consider good to very good that weren't anywhere close. They would have seemed just great had I not previously experienced one that was just sublime.
But yeah -- there are countless ways, traditional and adapted that tofu gets used (besides obviously cheesecakes, mango pudding etc.) that are culinarily Very Far From Chicken.
On the other stuff, if you just meant recipes like "Vegan spaghetti-o's and meatballs" 1 can vegan spaghetti-o's and one bag frozen vegan meatballs. cook spaghetti-o's, cook vegan meatballs, stir and serve...I am glad there are those out there, and are probably helpful to some people who might be considerably less experienced in the culinary arts than we'd hope to be.
Happy Holidays, everyone!
EDIT -- in the specific case of Jackfruit (which isn't tofu) it is pretty mind-blowing to what extent tacos and burritos have won. 30 years ago you would only ever see it in Indonesian restaurants where it would likely appear in a vegan Rijsttafel option. I surfed for a few minutes and was reminded how once you depart from the USA/UK/Canada, the percentage of tofu eaten by vegans or even vegetarians PLUMMETS -- non-vegetarians eat quite a lot of tofu (often in decidedly non-vegetarian dishes) -- I don't think it would be thought of as chicken-y in these applications. If you run across them, you could find out and let me know -- I do strictly avoid non-vegan tofu dishes, even when they are beautifully prepared examples of traditional cuisines, because vegan.
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and the new version is just nasty.
