Veeegs: December 2007 Archives

Our friends Ali and Evan who opened a bike-friendly, veggie-heavy café in Northeast Portland this summer recently asked us to develop the “ultimate vegan breakfast sandwich” for their expanding menu. The only requirements were that it be fairly easy and inexpensive to recreate in a commercial kitchen, that it be vegan, obviously, and that it do justice to some nutso all-female roller skating dance troupe that they were thinking of naming the sammy after.

So, last weekend the Hot Knives Test Kitchen got to work. It wasn’t hard to come up with the condiments, stacking ingredients and such. We are partial to creamy spreads, so we whipped up a dill aioli out of vegan mayo. Next came the mock meat component, where we quickly settled on maple tempeh bacon. Every sandwich needs a fresh veggie and a cooked veggie, so we went for thick-sliced heirloom tomatoes and rather than the obvious spinach, we went with sautéd kale in a little soy sauce and shallots.

Last but not least we needed the anchor of the sandwich that would replace the egg. We narrowed the field down to two variations of the same idea: a mock fried egg sandwich that relied on the gooiness of a handmade polenta and made two competing sammies: Sandwich A was a patty of firm, seasoned polenta fried off to order; Sandwich B centered around a fried tomato topped with much wetter polenta that mimicked Hollandaise. Both were sickly good, although we preferred A because it was a lot easier to eat. As for which one may end up on the Little Red Bike Café menu, well, it’s not up to us, but you can check here in coming months to see if either made the cut!

Ultimate Breakfast Sandwich Ingredients

1 Tbs. vegan margarine
4 cloves garlic, miced
4 crimin mushrooms
1 tsp. fresh thyme
3 cups water
1 cube vegetable bullion
1 cup course grain polenta
pinch of kosher salt
pinch of fresh black pepper
2 3-inch strips of tempeh
1 Tbs. maple syrup
1 tsp smoked salt
1 tsp paprika
1 Tbs. olive oil
1/2 cup kale, washed
1 shallot, minced
1 clove garlic, mined
1 Tbs. soy sauce
1 Tbs. vegan mayonnaise
1 tsp. fresh dill
1 Ciabatta bun, or any crispy/chewy roll

Sandwich A

1. Start by making your polenta patty. Place a medium saucepan on high heat with margarine, add garlic, sliced mushrooms and thyme and suate for about 3 minutes. Bring your water to boil in a teapot and add two cups only to the saucepan. Toss in bullion and bring back to a boil, stir.

2. Now whisk in your polenta slowly and bring down heat to medium. Cook like this, whisking every so often, for about 30-40 minutes or until thick like a rich batter. If it seems too thin, add a couple pinched more of polenta. (It will continue to thicken when cool.) Then remove from heat and immediately transfer polenta to a tall rammequin. Let it cool until firm, in the freezer it takes about 15-20 minutes.

3. In the meantime, fry up your tempeh bacon: put your paprika and smoked sat on a small plate, your maple syrup in a small bowl. Dip each slice of tempeh in maple syrup and then drop in dry spices. Then in a small pan, fry in a small amount of oil until maple syrup caramelizes to a dark brown. Set aside.

4. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil to blanche your kale leaves. Dunk them for 30 seconds and then drop them straight into an ice bath to keep them green. Then sauté your washed, cut kale leaves in the same pan with oil, shallots and soy until tender like sautéd spinach. Set aside.

5. Prepare aioli by mixing chopped dill with vegan mayo.

6. Once all components are ready, bring out your chilled polenta cake and remove from rammequin. Slice off one 1-inch thick slab and cook in your sauté pan with another 1 Tbs. of vegan margarine on medium heat just until slightly browning on outside and molten inside.

Sandwich B

1. Prepare your polenta Hollandaise by bringing all three cups of water to a boil. Add bullion cube, stir. Cook on medium heat, whisking every couple of minutes for 40 minutes. Polenta should behave like slop. Season as desired. Keep on low heat until ready to serve.

2. Prepare dill aioli, maple tempeh bacon and sautéd kale as described above.

3. Fry a tomato slice, a 1-inch thick slab, in a small sauté pan with a touch of olive oil. Season as desired. Flip and cook 1 minute on each side. Serve as main component with polenta covering the rest of the sandwich layers. Use a fork.

Beverage: Mikkeller’s Beer Geek Breakfast Stout
Soundtrack: Animal Collective’s “Whaddit I Done”

We are not known for luxurious deserts — it’s not our thing. We get too full to fast; we prefer savory salts, the occasional soft, ripe bloomy artisan French cheese, and hard after dinner liquors. We gorge on calories in other ways. But for the holidays, when the fruit cakes and weird chocolate logs start showing up on people’s tables, there are some far easier, awesome ways to serve festive vegan treats and get drunk at the same time. We’ve gotten obsessed with baking apples in apple beer.

The idea — not ours — came from our friend Molly’s grandfather who ran a Brooklyn deli for years and served baby apples baked with cherry cola inside. That grossed us out at first, then it turned us on: Why not slowly roast apples in a beer that already tastes like them, thereby fortifying them with more appleness as well as all the Belgian spice notes of a beer like Unibrou’s Ephemere? To “seal the deal” as it were, we came up with a coriander-spiked pastry crumble to bring out the coriander in the white winter beer. (And to listen to us walk you through the recipe, click here for our recent Good Food appearance.)

Beer Apples

(Serves 6)

6 Fuji apples
2 cups Ephemere apple-spiced beer
6 whole cloves
1/2 cup Earth Balance margarine
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 ground walnuts
1 tsp. coriander
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
fresh cilantro leaves for garnish

1. Pre-heat your over to 375 degrees.

2. Core your apples, twisting them out gently with an apple corer, and place them in a long, deep bread pan. They should sit snug so they don’t bob around. Pour 2 cups of beer, which is most of the bottle (just enough for a cup while cooking!), on top of the apples. You’ll want them two-thirds submerged. Put the pan in the oven to roast for about 45 minutes or until softened and starting to get blistery with a slight mushy look. The beer should be reduced by about half.

3. While your apples roast, whip up the simple pastry crust to top ‘em off. Mix softened vegan margarine in a bowl with equal parts flour and sugar and some finely chopped walnuts. Roughly crush the fresh coriander seed in a mortar and pestle and add to the mix. Using a fork push it around into a rustic crumble and finish it off by squeezing in your hands until evenly mixed.

4. Once the apples are ready, pull them out of the oven and stuff them (not too tight) with most of the pastry crumble. What’s left, sprinkle on top and let fall into the reducing beer goo. When you put the apples back in the oven for another 10-12 minutes the crumble will melt into a sugary syrup with the beer.

5. To serve, place one apple on a small desert plate. Spoon some extra beer syrup on the side and drizzled on top, and then garnish with one fresh green cilantro leaf.

Beverage: Unibrou’s Ephemere
Soundtrack: Silver Apples’ “I Have Known Love”

Just like Thanksgiving, the December month is one long, beloved food holiday for us at Hot Knives, even though we typically try hard to disassociate our gluttonous chillin’ from any of the uncomfortable religious undertones. This year, we decided instead to revel in the festive ties to the so-called Holy Land. After all, we have no beef with Jesus, Abraham and friends, or Mohammad. So, this holiday season we’ve been playing with turning holiday favorites both vegan and Middle Eastern, a sort of Pilgrimage to the Tasty Land. And we're getting a jump on it starting now.

During a recent cooking sesh (chronicled in the below video!) we played with the British staple figgy pudding, and reversed the history of colonization by turning it Israeli — the recipe follows too. You can serve the stuff piping hot or room temp almost like a sweet terrine. We put it under grilled pears, but you can just go Jackson Pollack on it by drizzling sweet pomegranate molasses all around it and eating it by itself like a desert. In the video we also toyed with a Christmas (red and green) harissa, as well as a dish we’re calling “Beets Bethlehem” that will follow shortly along with more holiday-related treats.

Figgy Pudding

(Serves 8-10)

2 cups white wine (sweet works well)
2 cups figs (dried)
8 oz. Israeli couscous
1/2 cup vegan margarine
1 Tbs. fresh tarragon
2 cups unsweetened almond milk
1 tsp. all spice
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground cloves
1/2 cup tahini paste
1 cup raw walnuts
1 tsp. kosher salt

1. To prep, set your oven on 350 degrees and also bring 2 cups of white wine to a near boil. Place your dried figs in a bowl and re-hydrate by covering with the wine. Let those sit for about 10 minutes.

2. Toast the couscous: Empty the bag onto a baking pan and place in the over for 5-8 minutes, shaking pan every couple of minutes to toast evenly. Remove and cool.

3. On the stove, start a medium saucepan over medium heat and add your margarine and tarragon. After a minute or two, add the almond milk and bring to a boil slowly, then toss in all spices and let simmer for about 10 minutes. Stir in the tahini as a thickener. Remove from heat.

4. Drain the figs but save the wine. In a food processor, pulse the figs for a couple seconds to get an uneven chop, not too fine. Dump figs in a large mixing bowl and add the toasted couscous. In the same food processor, pulse about 1 cup of raw walnuts and add those as well. Then pour in creamy liquid, and mix thoroughly, adding about 1/3 cup of the wine as well. Season with salt. The resulting mixture should be gloppy and a little grainy.

5. Line a deep bread pan with wax paper. Melt another 2 Tbs. of margarine and coat the wax paper with it to grease. Pour the figgy mixture in the wax paper-lined pan, cover it with aluminum foil and place the pan inside a wider dish to create a double boiler. Add about 2/3 cup water to the outer dish: the liquid will boil and gently cook the pudding.

6. Bake for about 1 hour at 350 degrees. Check halfway through, refill water if needed. If pudding is too wet after one hour (it should be able to be served in cut squares) simply remove foil and bake with the water-filled pan for another 10 minutes.

7. Once cooked and cool enough to cut, slice in 1-inch thick squares. Serve by itself, or garnish with tarragon and a sweet pomegranate glaze. Or serve underneath a grilled fruit like pears or persimmons (pictured above).

Beverage: Alesmith’s Yuletide Ale (Winter version)
Soundtrack: Primal Scream’s “Little Death”