Plant Based U

Fat-Free and Low Fat Vegan Plant Based Recipes

recipe

Vegan Fish Sauce Recipe

by 8 Comments

So why make vegan fish sauce? Well if you like to make your own vegan Thai or Vietnamese food, fish sauce is a very common ingredient and gives these cuisines a nice flavour. I used this vegan fish sauce recipe for using in Nuoc Cham (the sauce used for Bun Chay aka vermercelli salad bowls) and you can also use it to season fresh Thai papaya salad. (It’s made with green unripe papaya and is more like a raw squash)

I found this recipe online for vegan fish sauce and ordered some mushroom flavored soy sauce from Amazon because I wasn’t sure if I could find some at the store. If you have access to an Asian specialty store they will probably have it too.  As I hadn’t tried mushroom soy sauce before I didn’t know if it was much different than regular dark soy sauce. It actually doesn’t taste much different to me (aside from being super super salty compared to the low sodium soy sauce I normally use).  You can use regular dark soy sauce instead if that’s all you can find, as it will probably come out pretty similar. Make sure it’s dark soy sauce and not light or low sodium soy sauce for this recipe.

For my purposes I reduced the original recipe by 1/3 as I only had a small empty tamari bottle to store the sauce in. So feel free to make as much as you care for but this recipe below makes about 1 cup. I used this in my Nuoc Cham sauce for my Bun Chay recipe.

Vegan Fish Sauce Recipe

Makes 1 cup

Ingredients:

1/2 cups shredded wakame (find it at the Asian or health food store by the Nori)
2 cups filtered water
2 large garlic cloves, crushed
1 tsp whole peppercorns
1/3 cup mushroom flavored dark soy sauce, regular soy sauce or GF tamari
1 tsp of genmai miso (it’s already pretty salty so this is optional)

Directions:

1. Combine wakame, garlic, peppercorns and water in a large sauce pan and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer about 20 minutes. Strain and return the liquid back to the pot. Add soy sauce, bring back to a boil and cook until mixture is reduced and almost unbearable salty. Remove from heat and stir in miso.

2. Decant into a bottle and keep in the refrigerator. Use one-for-one to replace fish sauce in vegan recipes.

Additional Info: 

Wakame is the seaweed used often in seaweed salad in Japanese restaurants. It’s shredded into little strips. So if you’ve ever tried seaweed salad you’ll be familiar with it.

Have you ever had fish sauce before? 

How To Make Seitan or Vegan “Wheat Meat”

by 7 Comments

Seitan or “wheat meat” is made from wheat gluten, the protein that makes wheat flour stick together and makes bread spongey. Seitan is often used to make mock meats and is frequently used in vegetarian Chinese cuisine. It’s also used in Tofurkey products along with tofu to help it stick together.

I was a little apprehensive about making my own seiten as I had never made it before, but it turns out to be VERY easy. To make seitan quickly it is faster to just buy vital wheat gluten “flour” (which is essentially just wheat protein with all of the starch removed). You can still make seitan using regular flour, but you have to soak it overnight and wash away all the starch and you don’t end up with as much gluten left compared to the flour you started with.

And just a note if you have celiac disease or gluten intolerance, please don’t make this recipe! I don’t have any problem consuming wheat or gluten containing products, so I use them occasionally as part of a low fat plant based diet.

Let’s get started.

How To Make Seitan From Vital Wheat Gluten

Makes 4-6 seitan cutlets

Ingredients:

1 cup vital wheat gluten (I used Bob’s Red Mill)
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp ginger powder
3/4 cup vegetable broth (low sodium) or water
1-2 tbsp light soy sauce or tamari
6 cups vegetable broth (for cooking)

Directions:

1. In a medium to large sized bowl, combine vital wheat gluten and dry spices.

2. In another bowl, mix the soy sauce and 3/4 cup of vegetable broth or water.

3. Combine the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients and stir together. It should become very sticky. Use your hands to form it into a ball.

4. Knead the seitan a dozen times to ensure it’s spongey and allow it to rest for 5 minutes.

5. Separate the ball of seitan into four or five smaller chunks. Stretch each piece of seitan into a thin cutlet as best you can to around 3/4″.

 6. Add seitan to 6 cups of vegetable broth in a large pot and bring to a low boil and then reduce to a simmer for 1 hour. Depending what you are using the seitan for you can add additional seasonings or vegetables for flavor as well.  Make sure you have enough liquid to cover the seitan. It will expand a lot while cooking and puff up.

7. Drain seitan and chop up to use in a recipe, or dry it off and store in a ziplock bag or a tupperware container in the freezer. You can double the recipe and make two batches to make this more cost effective if using vegetable broth.

Check out my Seitan Makhani (“Unbuttered Chicken”) recipe here.

What do you think? How did you seitan turn out?