10.05.08
Posted in Belovedary, food, good things, health, non-casein, non-dairy, vegan at 7:20 pm by Hanne Blank
For tedious reasons that do not bear a dissertation at this point, my Belovedary’s doctor has directed him to pursue a course of primarily vegan eating for the next six months. Dairy and eggs are strictly verboten, and while fish is permitted, meats of all other sorts are meant to be a “major holidays only, if you can’t avoid it” sort of thing.
The Belovedary’s co-workers, it seems, have had a skeptical field day with this, teasing that he’ll never be able to maintain such a regime, and proclaiming with a metaphorical wrist-to-forehead swoon that they would starve to death if they had to go vegan.
This is, of course, all very silly. But it’s likewise true that many people seem to be terrified of the idea, let alone the reality, of vegan eating and cooking. My reaction, on the other hand, was “oh, okay, but how do you feel about continuing to use oyster sauce in cooking?” ( We have decided that, as oysters are considered permissible in Chinese Buddhist vegetarian cooking, and as fish is permitted by the sawbones in question, the oyster sauce can stay. But if it couldn’t, there are vegan alternatives for it to be had.)
You see, my take on it is that human beings are omnivores, and “omnivore,” by definition, means that you’ll eat anything that is edible. Therefore the prospect of an entirely-vegetable meal, or even several months or years of entirely-vegetable meals, really shouldn’t bother anyone too much. Besides, as I have mentioned previously in this blog, you still get to eat French fries (made in vegetable oil) and pie (made with vegetable shortening), to say nothing of things like Fish-Fragrant Eggplant, ratatouille, hummus, mushroom-pecan pate, channa masala, and red beans and rice, so really, I am not so convinced that veganism is a prison sentence. (Unlike, say, being the captive audience of a militant animal-welfare-wingnut vegan who won’t shut the hell up about it, which is.)
Probably it helps that I was a vegetarian for 11 years of my life, and vegan for two of those, so this is not unfamiliar territory to me. Probably it also helps that with an allergy to dairy protein, I eat vegan by default any time I don’t eat a meal containing meat or eggs. But mostly, I think the way to stop being scared and feeling deprived when faced with veganism — or with any dietary regime that is limited in some way — is to get into the kitchen and start experimenting. Its hard to feel like you’re missing out if you’re eating really well within the boundaries of what is available to you.
I bring all this up because, given what we’ve been handed as a household, the content here for at least the next six months or so is likely to be 99.6% vegan. If you find that offensive, there are about seventy billion other food blogs out there, not a few of them fully and vigorously omnivorous, so don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya.
As for me, I’m looking at it as an opportunity to blog about more dairy-free recipes — that will also, for the time being, be meat- and egg-free, or at least exist in versions that don’t use animal products. The astute among you will have already realized that just as you can often take a dish that contains animal products and vegetarianize or veganize it by removing and/or replacing the things you don’t want to eat, you can also take vegan recipes and add things to them. (I myself am partial to a hard-cooked egg or two in my channa masala.)
So what have we been eating since the whitecoated declaration was made? Noodle soup with tofu and chiles. Roasted cauliflower, eggplant, and Brussels sprouts. Homemade bread with cashew butter and apricot jam. Red beans slow-cooked with four kinds of sweet and hot peppers. Black bean soup enhanced with liberal handfuls of smallage (bunching celery) and poblano chiles. Aloo ghobi, the Indian potato-and-cauliflower dish. Oatmeal cookies with dried tart cherries. Cantonese-style pickled cauliflower. Hummus sprinkled with diced smoked black and green olives. Honeycrisp apples, “Shinko” Asian pears, Macoun apples, the last of the year’s peaches.
Tomorrow I will be making an apple pie in the morning. While it bakes, I’ll prep several pounds of plum tomatoes for gradual caramelizing in a slow oven all day long. We’ll eat them tossed with pasta, perhaps, or made into an out-of-this-world pesto and smeared on homemade pain de campagne. Or maybe I’ll marinate some portobello mushroom caps in sherry and soy sauce and olive oil and garlic and grill them on my panini grill, and put caramelized tomatoes on top of each one.
Yeah, I don’t know what I’d eat if I had to go vegan, either. It’s just so hard to choose.
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10.01.08
Posted in Books & Publishing, arrrrgh, cookbooks, desserts, food, how to, non-dairy, reviews, vegan at 8:11 am by Hanne Blank
I’ve got nothing against Jeff Rogers, author of Vice Cream: Over 70 Sinfully Delicious Dairy-Free Delights, although it does bear saying that his self-chosen sobriquet, “The Naughty Vegan!” is, in a word, twee.
Nor do I have anything against the idea behind his book, namely, that people who do not wish to consume animal dairy products, for whatever reason, might nevertheless enjoy a frozen dessert that wasn’t an ice or a sorbet. In fact, I heartily agree.
But I do have a number of problems with this recipe book.
First off, there’s the title. I will skip, for the moment, a discussion of why I find the invoking of terms like “vice” and “sin” in relation to food to be problematic and merely point out that if one is so devoted to clean living that one is capable of considering vegan desserts made (as instructed!) with all-organic ingredients and nary a speck of refined sugars to be “sinful,” one is perhaps living an overly-virtuous life.
Second is the fact that there are, in essence, only two recipes. All the “over 70″ variations are nothing more than ringing the changes on the two methods. Further, the two methods themselves differ only the slightest bit, in that the “raw” recipes use dates as sweetener instead of the “cooked” maple syrup called for in all the others. It is only out of courtesy that I can bring myself to say they are even two methods, rather than a more accurate one-and-a-half. Whether you find it admirable or infuriating that someone managed to parlay a recipe and a half — and not even a particularly challenging or difficult-to-derive recipe-and-a-half at that — into a book deal is entirely a matter of perspective, and heaven knows mine has oscillated to and fro all evening.
Nevertheless, the recipes are there, and therein lies the third problem: whoever edited this book should be keelhauled. I got the strong impression, reading it, that whoever was assigned to edit the book over at Celestial Arts (an imprint of Ten Speed Press) back in 2003 or so had never been inside a kitchen in his or her life, and had certainly not bothered to test any of the recipes.
Interestingly, the poor editing doesn’t show much on first browse. The copy is clean and the recipes are presented clearly. But when you begin to read with the intent of actually preparing (I’d say “cooking,” but for the fact that none of these desserts is cooked, meaning that the author has completely ignored the family of frozen desserts that use a custard base) one or two, the problems bob to the surface like clots of wheatgrass scum in an inadequately-mixed smoothie.
On the surface, the recipes seem very simple. The recipes consist of nut milks, prepared with either juice or water, some sweetener, and either fruit or flavorings in the form of extracts or spices. They rely heavily on the use of a blender and/or a juicer, not only to puree fruits and other flavorings, but also to generate the nut milk to be used as the base.
Let me say that again: to generate the nut milk to be used as a base. This book was published in 2004. Does anyone else see the problem here? Nowhere does Rogers discuss the use of prepared nut milks–which have been readily available since well before he wrote the book–in making vegan frozen desserts, nor does he even acknowledge their existence except for canned coconut milk, which he grudgingly acknowledges will do in a pinch. Also, while I appreciate the fact that Vice Cream does not rely entirely upon soy milk, the fact that it is mentioned nowhere in the book is an issue that, like a number of others, makes me think that Rogers did not approach his task as a cookbook writer — which is to say as someone aware of and capable of explaining the technical and material scope of his project and where it fits in to the larger culinary picture — but primarily as a chronicler of things he had done in his own kitchen that happened to work out well. Sadly, he did not have an editor perspicacious enough to query him on these issues, or to just encourage him to get a blog instead of attempting an actual book, which frankly would’ve been a lot more appropriate to the material.
While we’re on the subject of Things A Halfway Competent Cookbook Editor Should Have Caught, beware the paragraph Rogers includes on non-nutritive sweeteners for these desserts. Rogers recommends the use of stevia for sweetening without adding sugars in order to make diabetic-friendly and low-GI-friendly desserts. Fine as far as it goes; as it happens I am a big fan of stevia so was glad to see it featured. Rogers then fails to address the fact that stevia is produced in both liquid and powder forms, and in the liquid form, that both glycerin- and alcohol-based solutions are available, and that these variations are going to pose different challenges to creating a final product that performs well in terms of taste and texture. Most bizarrely of all, Rogers does not even hint that there could be a major texture problem with stevia-sweetened creams, which rather boggles the mind given that he is calling for recipes that ordinarily include a cup of maple syrup to be sweetened, instead, with one and a half teaspoons of a dry powder. That’s rather a lot of liquid to have just vanish from a frozen dessert and expect to have it turn out in anything like the same texture as the original recipe.
Similar lack of testing shows, and even more blatantly, in Rogers’ suggestion that brown rice syrup “may work well” when mixed with other sweeteners. Yes, it may. So might agave nectar, or malt syrup, or crystalline fructose, or for that matter the sweet sweet nectar of generosity and kindness that courses through my veins and that has so far kept me from using obscenities in writing this review. But again, I expect more from a cookbook than a hand-wave and a “well, hey, this might work.” Mr. Rogers, if you’re reading this, you may be a stalwart person, a charming conversationalist, and a dab hand with a Champion juicer, but you’re a crap cookbook writer, and you can tell your editor I said so.
While we’re on the sweetener subject, let’s talk about maple syrup. I like maple syrup. I like it a lot. I cook with it frequently. But it has a rather particular and specific flavor of its own, even when very cold. To have it feature in every single one of the non-raw recipes seems like… oh, I don’t know… no, wait, I do: culinary laziness. In some of the recipes, like the chai, or (of course!) the maple walnut, it seems like just the thing. But I can’t be the only person who saw it in a recipe for peppermint ice cream and involuntarily made a face. Maple syrup simply isn’t the best sweetener in every conceivable case. Even if one doesn’t want to attempt honey (not vegan to some) or refined cane sugar, there are numerous other sweetening options, some of which I mentioned in the previous paragraph. For that matter, why not explore other maple syrup options? For instance, how about using the more strongly-flavored Grade B syrup in places where a stronger maple flavor would be desirable? What about crystallized maple sugar, which has a very alluring texture? The All Maple Syrup All The Time regime is lazy and dull, and the All Honey Date All The Time regime in the “raw” portion of the book isn’t any better.
While I’m here, I just have to say a word or two about one particular paragraph in the front matter. On page 12 of the edition I am looking at, there’s a short paragraph about durian. Just as durian itself is a humdinger of a fruit, this is a humdinger of a paragraph:
“…[durian is] shipped to the United States frozen, so you may find it in the freezer section. Durian is a large, thorny, hard-skinned fruit containing four to five sections of fleshy fruit, each enclosing several large seeds. A seven-pound durian will yield about two and a half pounds of edible fruit. When the fruit is ripe and at room temperature, you can pull apart some of the thorns to create a tear in the skin, exposing the fruit within. Be careful as the thorns are sharp and can cut skin. You can also cut the durian open with a knife, which is a little safer. Be warned that durian is also called “stinky fruit.” It has a very distinctive odor, sometimes mistaken for natural gas.”
Where to begin? First of all, in many major cities (very much including Seattle, where Rogers lives), durian is in fact available fresh. But let us suppose that frozen durian is the only thing available. How long does it take to thaw one out? Should it be thawed at room temperature or in the refrigerator? Does the texture change markedly if it has been frozen, and if so, does this affect how one might handle it for a recipe? You certainly won’t find out from Rogers, who leapfrogs straight from dragging this deep-frozen sea mine of a tropical fruit home from the nearest freezer section to having a ripe durian at room temperature. Which he then proceeds to indicate can be pulled apart, at some risk to life and limb, before making the concession that one could conceivably use a knife.
What is that about? I mean, aside from patent idiocy? You can render a watermelon into pieces by dropping it from a height, too, and portion out servings of tuna noodle casserole by sticking your bare hand right into the bubbling hotdish, but most folks prefer to avoid unnecessary injury and mess and use the utensils that were developed specifically for the purpose of performing such tasks. You know, like knives. Which would certainly be the first thing I reached for if I had occasion to try to dismember something that weighed as much as a sack of potatoes and was sufficiently spiky that it would do nicely as a projectile weapon.
Those of you who have encountered the durian in the flesh may also concur with me that the warning about the smell comes a bit late in the game and is, in fact, almost criminally understated. This is a fruit, after all, that has been banned from public transit, airplanes and airports, and some hotels in the countries (like Malaysia) where it is grown, and these are countries where large numbers of people actively enjoy eating it. I have eaten durian, both fresh and frozen, and in various preparations, and I quite like the flavor. But even I cannot help but concur with Richard Sterling, who writes “…… its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock.” There is a Malay saying that durian “smells like him, but tastes like her.” This is, you begin to comprehend, not a fruit to be approached in a casual sort of way, unless one lives not only alone, but without any neighbors within, say, a half a mile.
And after all this, how much durian pulp is actually required to make the Coconut Durian flavour of raw “vice cream”? A whopping one and a quarter cups. God alone knows what Rogers assumes the hapless vegan is going to do with the remainder of an extremely large and, at best, rather difficult fruit. For this, and his many other sins, including neglecting to mention that the same markets that sell whole durian fresh or frozen also often have the frozen pulp available in smaller quantities much more amenable to experimentation, I have but one recommendation:
Divide surplus durian pulp into two cardboard takeaway food containers. Seal them up, but not too thoroughly.
Send one to Jeff Rogers.
And send the other to his editor.
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09.04.08
Posted in american, cooking, food, main dishes, non-casein, non-dairy, original recipes, vegan at 4:12 pm by Hanne Blank
This is a cellphone photo of my lunch yesterday, which, in this case, was, a serving of a dish I first devised in college when I was poor and had to make something hearty for a vegan potluck. My roommate at the time christened it, amusingly if not entirely charitably, “Hungry Hungry Hippie.” (The reference, for those too young to get it, was to the children’s board game Hungry Hungry Hippos, introduced by Hasbro in the late 1970s.)
Hungry Hungry Hippie is one of those dishes for which I will never publish anything like a precise recipe because there really can’t be one.
Nonetheless, I love Hungry Hungry Hippie to this day, and wish to spread the joy.
Hungry Hungry Hippie is, in its most elemental form and as pictured here, a sort of pilaf of cooked seasoned barley tossed with cubed tofu.
It can get plenty fancy if you have the scratch and the interest.
But usually, if you are making Hungry Hungry Hippie, you don’t.
How you make the basic version (and it makes plenty) is like this:
– you take about seven cups of water and you put it in a big heavy-bottomed pot what’s got a lid to it, and you start heating it
– then you flavor the water with a spoonful or two of Vegemite or Marmite, maybe some miso, and some onion powder and garlic powder; the water should end up pretty strongly flavored and a notch or so saltier than you’d want it for soup. You use the Vegemite or Marmite (I prefer the latter) because it has a lovely strong meaty flavor that goes really well with the barley, and also seems to penetrate and soak into the barley better than anything else. Don’t use boullion cubes instead of Vegemite or Marmite, it won’t work, it’ll taste of salt and nothing else.
–then you add a couple-three tablespoons of olive oil or whatever kinda oil you got. Bacon grease is amazing in this, but totally not vegan or vegetarian. You do what turns you on.
– then you pour in 2 cups of pearled barley and you stir it, and you bring it to a boil
– then you reduce the heat to a low simmer, cover it most of the way, and let it simmer until the barley kernels get to swelling appreciably
– whereupon you give it a stir, turn the heat off, put the lid on tight, and ignore it for a couple hours until all the liquid is absorbed
– at which point you drain and cube a pound or so of firm tofu and toss it into the barley, and reheat the whole thing a little (add another half-cup of liquid if you do it on the stovetop, or else put the whole thing (covered) in the oven at 300F for a bit)
And then you eat it! Unless, of course, you’d like to add something yummy to it first.
Many things can be added to Hungry Hungry Hippie along with the tofu. Some combination of sauteed onions, garlic, celery, and mushrooms is good. Thoroughly caramelized onions are super-duper rockin’. So are caramelized tomatoes, or little bits of sun-dried tomato. Sauteed cabbage (sliced thinly) goes into it nicely. So does chopped fresh parsley. And so do chopped up dried tart fruits like unsweetened dried apricots, or cranberries. When I could, I used to eat it with a dollop of sour cream on top.
But it’s also really tasty (and hella easy) on its own. I like it with a healthy wodge of black pepper ground on top.
Its many virtues include keeping well, reheating well, being very nutritious, being very filling, having lots of complex carbs that will handily carry you through the day, being high in fiber, and being extremely economical.
Good for hippies and other living things. Give it a whirl.
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08.24.08
Posted in Cantonese cuisine, chinese, cooking, culture, food, non-casein, non-dairy at 2:27 pm by Hanne Blank
To celebrate my Belovedary’s recent birthday, as well as our 12th anniversary, and additionally to roll in the belated birthday celebration of a good friend of ours, I decided to make a Chinese-style feast for the four of us. Four is, to be honest, too small a number for a real banquet, as far as Chinese cookery goes. Chinese banquets usually run into the double digits in terms of numbers of courses, and are intended for large groups of friends or family.
Nonetheless, one can still have an awfully nice feast by following the general principles of Chinese banqueting, which is basically that one pulls out all the stops and acquires large quantities of meat, seafood, and poultry — sometimes very exotic things, or in very exotic preparations, depending on how impressive the banquet is to be. Meat is a traditional food for feasts and celebrations all over the world, and always has been, and it is surely the case in China. In fact, the focus of Chinese banqueting is so much directed toward the meat-fish-poultry end of the spectrum that in many cases, rice is not served at banquets despite its centrality to Chinese eating and culture, unless possibly at the end of the meal as a near-formality.
The message encoded in the absence of rice from the table is quite alien to a culture like ours where we are both very affluent and very fond of large slabs of meat as a central part of our eating (and don’t kid yourself that these aren’t related things), and unlikely to be perceived by Westerners who rarely eat rice anyway and for whom it does not occupy the same mental space as it does for most Asians and certainly for the Chinese. In China, you don’t ask a visitor if they are hungry, or if they have had lunch or dinner already, you ask “hee ca fan mai?” (Cantonese; the Mandarin is ni chi fan le ma?), which means, quite literally “have you eaten rice yet?” The same sentiment is a common greeting in other places too, notably Thailand. Like the word “bread” in the phrase “give us this day our daily bread,” rice is not just a food, rice is food.
When rice is absent from the table at a Chinese meal, it means that you are, at least temporarily, so prosperous and that you don’t have to think about the stuff — rice — that the common people use to fill their bellies. You can and in fact you are encouraged to do something that under normal circumstances has been almost unthinkable, both culturally and economically, for everyone but the highest of elites. You can eat your fill of meat.
(Yes, there are Buddhist banquets that are 100% vegetarian. Most are in fact vegan. And other Buddhist banquets that are vegetarian except for four or five types of seafood that are considered permissible. But even they are remarkably concerned with, and centered around, meat… albeit in the form of mock meats made from seitan, tofu, and various kinds of mushrooms and fungus. The symbolism of meat and prosperity, and meat and largesse, is insistent.)
It should thus come as no surprise that our four-person feast was a fiesta of animal protein.
Clockwise from upper middle: ginger-scallion oil for dipping, boiled dumplings with pork filling, white cut chicken, ginger-soy dipping sauce, roasted chili oil (in center), ginger-scallion explosion shrimp.
The least glamorous looking of these dishes is actually one of my favorites, white cut chicken. It is a Cantonese favorite, and the method of preparing it is one that makes many Western cooks look very worried indeed, although I have made it dozens of times without mishap. It is essentially a boiled whole chicken (you cut it into chopstickable pieces, with or without the bones still in as you prefer, to serve it), cooked with ginger and green onion. But what makes it special is that it is boiled only very briefly, so that it remains juicy and sweet and firm, rather than getting the stringy, cooked-to-death texture that is so common to boiled poultry otherwise.
I take mine off the bone, removing the meat in the largest pieces possible and then cutting them into chopstickable chunks, because I dislike the inevitable bone fragments that chopping through the bones (more traditional) generates. It is served with ginger-scallion oil and usually with soy sauce as well, for diners to dip the meat into as they like. It is a subtle and very pleasing dish, very treasured, and one of those traditionally served at ancestor worship rituals like Ching Ming and the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts.
Method for White Cut Chicken:
Take a small to medium-sized whole chicken, very fresh and of very good quality, plucked, drawn, cleaned, and well washed in plenty of cold water, and put it in a large pot. Fill the pot with cold water until the chicken is submerged to the depth of about 2 inches. Add a large bunch of green onions, cleaned and pared, and a three-inch chunk of peeled fresh gingerroot cut into thick coins. Place the pot over a brisk flame and bring to a full rolling boil. Let boil for about 5 minutes, then remove the pot from the heat, cover, and let cool until the chicken is cool enough to handle.
Note: this takes some time, usually several hours, but it depends on how warm or cool the room is. However, this is part of the cooking process! Residual heat helps ensure that your chicken is completely cooked. Don’t try to rush the cooling artificially, in other words. Just let it happen.
When the chicken is cool enough to handle, lift it out of the broth (this cooking liquid makes a wonderful base stock for many soups, as well as for congee, so don’t throw it away!) in a large wire scoop, or using two large slotted spoons. Put it in a shallow pan to let the liquid drain off. When it is no longer dripping wet, either cut it into manageable-sized pieces bones and all using a cleaver (remove the wings and legs, chop them crosswise into chunks, then cut along either side of the spine and flatten the torso, then cut it up), or else remove the meat from the bones in large pieces, then cut the large pieces into chopstick-ready ones. Generally, if you cut the bird up bones and all, you should leave the skin on. This is not possible when you are removing the meat from the bones.
Serve at room temperature or chilled.
A note about the above method: some cookbooks will tell you to place the chicken into a pot of already-boiling water, return it to a boil, and proceed from there. Sometimes they will not only do this but will also tell you to remove the chicken from the pot before it has cooled down as much as it should. I have tried this method and have never ended up with satisfactory results. All too often, plunging a raw bird into boiling water merely means that the outer margins of the bird get cooked instantaneously and come up to heat quickly, and the boiling water thus returns to a boil rapidly, but the water does not get hot enough for long enough to thoroughly cook the bird. It is very discouraging to start to cut up the chicken for serving only to find that it is still raw at the thickest bit of thigh or breast, and recooking, while possible, tends to dry out the meat. Putting the chicken into cold water and bringing it up to a boil ensures that the whole contents of the pot, including every cubic centimeter of that chicken, will come up to boiling temperature together. Likewise, having it stand in the hot water until the water and the chicken are cool enough to handle is part of the cooking process. This is not a dish to attempt if you don’t plan to be knocking around the house most of the day. The actual time you spend doing hands-on cooking is minimal, but the cooking time, strictly speaking, is extensive.
You serve white cut chicken with plain soy sauce, but also with what I think of as “mad scientist” or “magic” oil made with lots of ginger and green onion to complement the perfume of green onion and ginger from the cooking liquid.
Method for Ginger-Scallion Oil:
Combine 1/3 cup minced fresh raw ginger and 1/2 cup thinly sliced fresh raw green onions or scallions in a largish heatproof nonreactive bowl (ceramic or stainless steel are usually best). Heat 1 cup peanut, canola, corn, or other neutral-flavored oil (not olive oil) until it is just at the smoke point. Pour the
hot oil over the ginger and green onion: it will foam up and seethe and billows of fragrant steam will erupt from the bowl like the stereotypical mad scientist’s lab flasks or witch’s cauldron. Give it a gentle stir with a chopstick or a spoon and let it stand until it cools to room temperature, after which it should be covered. Leftovers should be refrigerated.
Leftover ginger-scallion oil can be used in a variety of ways, not least to flavor congee, plain rice, eggs, or tofu.
Tomorrow, if I get a chance, I will post again and write out my recipe for these:
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08.18.08
Posted in Uncategorized, cooking, culture, food, food allergies, non-casein, non-dairy, politics, salad dressings, salads, vegan, writing at 2:00 pm by Hanne Blank
Upon discovering my dairy allergy, one of the categories of things that immediately vanished from my food options was the category of the creamy dip or dressing. Mayonnaise, of course, was still an option, as were creamy-textured dips and dressings that had a mayonnaise base, since mayonnaise is an egg emulsion and not made with dairy products. But since it is frequently impossible to tell visually whether a dressing or dip that one is served at a restaurant or party is exclusively mayonnaise-based or whether it is dairy-based or as is often the case, made of some combination of dairy and mayonnaise, I quickly learned to just avoid anything that looked creamy.
This wasn’t a huge problem. I’d never been devoted to creamy dressings and dips. Then again I certainly had been known to enjoy roquefort or ranch salad dressings now and then, and once or twice a year would get a horrifyingly intense jones for the Lipton onion soup sour-cream-and-onion chip dip and would eat a whole pint of it over the course of a couple of days. It didn’t seem like so much to give up. Still, not having the creamy-dip/dressing option got annoying after a while, particularly after I started to realize just how many vinaigrette-style prepared salad dressings also contained ingredients I couldn’t eat, most commonly in the form of small amounts of cheese.
Oh, I know from vinaigrettes and egg-based dressings, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been making my own salad dressings on a fairly regular basis for years. I can coddle an egg or two for a Caesar salad with the best of them (I just leave out the parmesan, and add extra anchovies). But… well… sometimes you want something with a nice creamy mouthfeel. And you don’t necessarily feel like being bothered to coddle eggs to get it.
Enter Hollyhock Dressing. The recipe was given to me by my wonderful friend and darned good cook, Liza, who warned me, not a bit hyperbolically as it turns out, that the stuff is addictive. It really is. Hollyhock dressing is fantastic stuff. It’s garlicky. It’s savory. It’s vegan. It keeps well. It’s easy to make, providing you’ve got a blender. And it’s creamy.
Seriously, this stuff is so good that I rarely make less than a double batch at a time. Often, I make a triple batch.
The ingredients are simple and few.
For a single batch, you will require:
- 1/3 cup water
- 1/3 cup tamari (you can use soy sauce but the flavor isn’t as good)
- 1/3 cup balsamic vinegar (you can use red wine vinegar or cider vinegar or whatever vinegar you like, but the flavor will be accordingly different, and balsamic is so yummy I rarely mess with anything else)
- 1 cup olive oil
- approximately 1 bulb worth of peeled raw garlic cloves (I usually just use 15 cloves because I peel large quantities of garlic ahead of time)
- 1 cup nutritional yeast
The method, likewise, is a complete and utter cakewalk:
Whiz the liquid ingredients together in your blender with the garlic until the mixture is as smooth as you can get it. Add the nutritional yeast in thirds, whizzing it together in the blender each time, and scraping down the walls of the blender jar after each blending. At the end, blend the mixture for an additional minute or so, just to make sure everything is completely combined and completely smooth.
Note: if you make a double or triple batch, make each batch separately in the blender, to avoid overloading your blender jar. Pour them out into a large bowl and stir them together as you finish blending the batches, to ensure a uniform consistency and taste.
Store, refrigerated and covered, for 3-4 hours before serving, or preferably overnight. Let come back up to room temperature before you serve it, as the olive oil will thicken quite a bit when it’s cold.
One of the best things about Hollyhock Dressing is how versatile it is. It’s great on salad, of course, and brilliant as a dip for crudites. But it’s also a wonderful dip for hard-boiled eggs, and anything you might be prone to dip into aioli or anchoiade you can certainly dip into this, a list which very much includes good crusty bread. Additionally, Hollyhock Dressing has an amazing affinity for potatoes. Pour it over your baked potatoes, or, if you want your mouth to think it died and went to heaven, use it instead of butter/margarine/milk/faux-milk in your mashed potatoes.
Try it. You can thank me later. Or better yet, thank Liza, who gave me the recipe and thus brought great joy into my culinary life… and made it commonplace for my Belovedary, not normally much given to salad-eating, to request a big plate of salad with his supper.
I told you it was good.
(Full disclosure: This photo is of the salad I had for lunch… mixed greens (several lettuces, rocket, parsley, a couple kinds of basil) plus Corno di Toro pepper and two sliced Brandywine tomatoes. My Belovedary, poor thing, is allergic to raw tomatoes, so this is categorically Not His Salad.)
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