Vegan Chick-Fil-A on homemade bao

Having never tried authentic Chick-Fil-A and recently experimenting with vegan cooking, my curiosity was piqued when I first encountered The Edgy Veg's Vegan Chick-Fil-A recipe. I used sesame oil in place of tahini in the seitan patties, omitted the liberal amounts of cayenne and chili powder she includes and used Whole New Mom's Egg Replacer recipe for that part of the binder.

I also made up a batch of bao to function as my buns.

My first two versions of this sandwich stayed fairly true to the original intent, sticking to toppings of pickles, homemade vegan cheese, vegan margarine and/or homemade navy bean spread. Yesterday, I decided to top them with just about every vegetable I had in the fridge and vastly preferred that version. I ran out of roasted red peppers on yesterday's venture and forgot to add the pickles, so today's bao were topped with bean spread, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, avocado and vegan Chick-Fil-A.

The breading is nicely seasoned and has a fantastic crunch. Really my only "issue" is that I found my seitan cutlets too thick. Now that I know I dislike having such thick patties, I can readily adjust next time.

Yum. Vegan brunch

This deliciousness was today's (late) breakfast. I oven-roasted some Ontario asparagus, paired it with my (work-in-progress) adaptation of vegan Hollandaise sauce (it's almost perfect), some rounds of vegan breakfast sausage I made over the weekend, and a vegan grilled cheese using homemade "mozzarella"

For the breakfast sausage, I omitted the thyme and added fennel seeds. Still, it could use a flavour-boost — I think I'll experiment with making a vegan chorizo.

But, yeah, this was a super-yummy breakfast. Tomorrow's variation will undoubtedly swap out asparagus for roasted sweet potato, as I've used up one and have been meaning to use the other for weeks. Should be stellar!

Refined sugar-free trifle!

We had some berries and coconut yogurt to use up in the fridge yesterday, so I thought I'd try my hand at taking another run at making a date-sweetened cake with the ultimate goal of making trifle.

Here's the recipe for the cake:

• ⅔ c. coconut milk
• ½ t. apple cider vinegar
• 1 c. packed pitted Medjool dates, soaked and drained
• ⅓ c. canola oil
• 2 t. vanilla extract
• 1 c. packed all-purpose flour (I used Robin Hood Nutri Flour Blend - Tastes like White)
• ¾ t. baking powder
• ½ t. baking soda
• ¼ t. salt

Preheat oven to 325° F. In a food processor, pulse to combine all of the wet ingredients. In a separate, large bowl, blend the dry ingredients. Scrape the wet ingredients into the dry and fold to combine well (but do not overmix). Pour the batter into a 9"x9" non-stick baking pan. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until the cake smells done (sorry, that's as scientific as I get with baking these days!). This is another cake which fails the toothpick test — I find that date-sweetened cakes lose a lot of flavour and moisture if you bake them until they pass the toothpick test.

So, both the cake and the trifle were fantastic. I will absolutely make it again.

Dairy-free lasagna?!

I daresay I'm getting better at making vegan cheese. Last week's attempt was another kick at the proverbial Vegan Buffalo Mozzarella can. This time, my medium of choice was sunflower seeds and I used the last of that week's batch of homemade coconut yogurt. The method was as per Miyoko Schinner's mozzarella recipe, but my quantities differed as follows:

• ~4½ c. soaked and drained sunflower seeds
• ~½ c. coconut yogurt
• 1 c. canola oil
• 1 T. sea salt
• 1 T. genmai miso
• water omitted due to adding water during blending to result in smoother consistency
• 2 c.(?!) tapioca flour
• 1 t. Kappa carageenan

Obviously, quintupling the general quantities resulted in a helluva lot of vegan mozzarella, so I've spent a good portion of the week having grilled "cheese" sandwiches, spreading it on crackers and topping pizzas with it. When we still had some leftover pizza ingredients by the week-end, I decided to use them up in a primavera-esque sauce (to which I also added 1 lb. of ground beef that we had in the freezer), and cooked up about half of our box of whole wheat lasagna noodles to toss everything into the first lasagna I've eaten in probably a decade or longer.

It was really good! The vegan cheese ends up behaving very similarly to ricotta. The first bite definitely carries a moment's hint of sunflower seed's bitterness, but from there, it adds a lovely smooth, creamy texture and flavour to the dish. I finished up the last of it for brunch this morning!

Update: freezing improves the texture of the vegan mozzarella! The lone ball that I froze came out of the freezer on Sunday night and was used yesterday, Monday, June 6th, on a grilled cheese and it was less wet than the balls which had gone directly into the fridge. Good to know!

Sunflower seeds are way less expensive than pine nuts

Continuing my foray into making seed cheeses, this batch uses Miyoko Schinner's Sharp Vegan Cheddar as its jumping-off point, substituting soaked, shelled sunflower seeds for cashews, coconut yogurt for the rejuvelac, and omitting the oil.

This batch has great flavour, and is far more economical than the batch I made with pine nuts. I think prefer using agar as a "gelling" agent, 'though — the carageenan "sheets". Overall, this was a huge success and I'm looking forward to attempting it with agar in the future.

More homemade bao

I think I've gotten the hang of making homemade bao. I actually remembered to account for the second rise this time, so I have much fluffier bao than my previous attempt. Also, this batch used all-purpose flour, rather than the bread flour I used last time. I think I'll switch back next time, I prefer the chew I get from using bread flour. I purchased a bamboo steamer basket from the local Seasons Foodmart yesterday and set to work on my most recent batch of bao today. I got the 18 cm steamer and can find two large, folded bao in it. They take about 20 minutes to steam-bake.

The first two out of the basket were filled with dairy-free Buffalo chicken sauce, a homemade coconut-based mayo (which I omitted from the third bao — it's too sour when paired with the other acidic ingredients), fresh cilantro, carrot do chua and pan-seared chicken breast.

It was a helluva brunch and I'm looking forward to having more over the course of the next couple of days!

"Butter" Chicken Pizza

In what is easily one of the yummiest things to emerge from my kitchen, I made up a "butter" chicken pizza yesterday.

I'm a fan of Spice Goddess, which I'm glad to state doesn't require a subscription to The Cooking Channel if one lives in Canada. Bal seems ridiculously approachable and is the first person I've seen truly demystify Indian cooking. So, yeah, I'm in love. Well, when I was watching an episode a few years ago, she whipped up her No-Butter Chicken, which uses yogurt in place of butter and which she swears tastes just as rich as the real deal. Needless to say, I'm a big fan of anything that adapts buttery-richness into a form I can eat without gut-wrenching pain.

So it came to be that when I found myself with a wealth of coconut yogurt to start finding uses for, I remembered Bal's promise of delectable, spicy goodness and got to work. I also whipped up a batch of her garam masala for use in the no-butter chicken recipe. The chicken recipe is a hit and I honestly don't know how I'm going to avoid the temptation to make it practically daily.

And yeah, it's fantastic as a pizza topping. I didn't use any other toppings and can't get over how satisfying yesterday's lunch was.