After whining about my tempeh failures, I wanted to toss up a few pictures of the gorgeousness of what I think is going to become my default house tempeh: soy-free chickpea-brown rice tempeh! So tasty, so easy.

Raw

Fried up with pomegranate juice and a whole bunch of other stuff I can’t really remember right now, but it was tasty!

To make it, just follow the basic tempeh recipe and use 1/2 chickpeas and 1/2 brown rice. I used short grain brown rice and chopped it up a bit in the food processor when raw, then cooked it super underdone-like.

Let me know how it goes for you!

the stuff of clouds: ur-tempeh’s baby mycelium after only about 10 hours of fermentation

Delicious TV, a veggie cooking show, recently visited my Bloodroot pals to do a segment on them. It’s not online yet, but you can see their Korova Cookie recipe showcased in this video–it’s a really amazing cookie. (And I haven’t forgotten the cookie recipe I mentioned a while ago, I will post it soon.)

Delicious TV also has a segment on tempeh making, check it out. It was fascinating to me because the tempeh makers apparently don’t cook their beans! It seems that they also don’t try to separate the hulls from the beans, or use vinegar, all of which I do. Wow. The end result looks exactly like my tempeh, but I can’t help thinking that it might be a little hard to digest, even with the fermentation, but who knows. They might ferment theirs a lot longer than mine.

Fermentation is always malleable, which is why my savory chef’s mind (as opposed to a precise pastry chef’s mind) likes fermentation projects so much. Tempeh can be made in a million different styles and with many different techniques and still turn out wonderfully. Adaptation, interpretation and improvisation are essential.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of tempeh improvisation lately. Ever since Sandor Katz told me about some sweet potato/black-eyed pea tempeh he made (!!!!!) I’ve been on a quest to make soy-free tempeh. So far it’s failing. The failures are teaching me so much, though, that I don’t really mind. The farmer who picks up my compost* has been happy to enrich his soils with rotten not-quite-tempeh, and tempeh is so cheap that a failure isn’t a tragedy.

I’ve made tempeh with between 50-80% soybeans and 50%-20% other grains and beans with success, but a recent batch of 100% black bean tempeh sucked it pretty hardcore.

I’m so used to the rhythms of soy tempeh—how long the beans need to cook, how often to skim off the hulls, that I completely forgot that black beans would need about half as much time to cook as soy beans. I pretended to myself that the super mushy beans I had on my hands would be OK if I waited until they were extra dry before mixing them with the spore and packing them into the tempeh forms, but deep down I knew it was probably a doomed experiment.

Here’s what I was pretending I didn’t already know: the big enemy of tempeh is excess moisture—you need non-mushy beans so that the mycelium (which is what makes tempeh tempeh) has space to grow around each bean fragment. I spread the beans out on sheet trays to dry for a few hours, then halfheartedly mixed them and packed them and incubated them. It wasn’t a complete failure, but it was very very loosely bound with the mycelium and never fermented quite as much as it should have.

Next week, Round Two:

No, that’s not frosting. Adzuki bean/amaranth tempeh failure: the mycelium, such as it is, is not threaded throughout the “tempeh” but is just sitting on top of the overly mushy mess, which was too dense to be colonized by the mycelium and turned into real tempeh.

The next week I learned absolutely nothing from the black bean mistake. I tried to make adzuki bean/amaranth tempeh, and in hindsight I see so clearly why it didn’t work: adzuki beans cook in a fraction of the time black beans do, so yet again I overcooked them. In addition, amaranth cooks into a mushy, porridgey mess. Mush is, of course, exactly the opposite of what you want in tempeh.

I probably won’t try this combination again, but if I did I wouldn’t cook the amaranth at all (the fermentation cooks it enough, maybe I would even dry-toast it first!) and I would just barely cook the adzuki beans.

For two weeks after that I made regular 100% soy bean tempeh, and it was flawless. Now, wounds licked, down but not out, I will continue experimenting (I have good feelings about chickpeas mixed with a little short grain brown rice) and will come back triumphantly sooner or later. To be continued…

Check out the original How to Make Tempeh post for more info on tempeh from scratch!

*I have two packed Earth Machines at the kitchen, and my compost heap at home is a stinky drive away, so thank you, Farmer Dave (not musician Farmer Dave, but thank you also, what the hell), for picking up my compost!

PS: If you’re interested in fermentation, be sure to take a look at the forums at wildfermentation.com!

Bullet points, here we go:

• Suddenly everyone I know is getting engaged, is pregnant, has a baby, or is married. HELP!!!!! Two friends got engaged this week, two are pregnant, one just had a baby. Where are my radical unmarrieds? Stand up! Be proud!
• If you’re a graphic designer/vegan chef/office worker looking to while away the hours with podcasts that don’t ask too much of your brain, here is a good list, and also here. I find that I can’t work in silence and sometimes even music isn’t quite enough, but a podcast will use just enough of my brain that the rest is free to work and work and work without background thoughts intruding. But finding a podcast that doesn’t make me angry or annoyed is always a challenge. Speaking of: hey, internet, would you like a list of the podcasts I listen to? If you’re interested in the wide worlds of podcasts, I’d be more than happy to share my thoughts on the ones I love, the ones I like OK, and the ones I only keep around for when it’s 2 AM and I’ve gone through all the good ones and are forced to listen to the dreaded vocabulary ones.
• Interesting!
• Also interesting, Nu-Ride, a ride-sharing thingie that I might sign up for–has anyone done this?
• About that Propagandhi song discussed in the comments to this post: I don’t find it funny at all, I find it annoying. For about 10 minutes in college I liked Propagandhi’s music, and I’ve always liked their politics, so this is all disheartening. Yes, Sandor’s position on meat (his response to the song is here—scroll down) is ridiculous, but COME ON.
• In related news, I was interested to read this account of Sandor’s experiences at Terra Madre (the Slow Food thing in Italy in October)—I saw him a few weeks ago and we talked about the vegan cheese he discusses in the article with much excitement. The details:  “…I even encountered a gorgeous example of a dairy-free “cheese,” Keckek el Fouqara from Lebanon. In Wild Fermentation I included a recipe for kishk, a Lebanese ferment I had read about and learned to make, combining bulgar wheat with yogurt to ferment. But of course no cultural tradition is singular. Keckek el Fouqara is known as “poor man’s kishk,” and it is an adaptation of the kishk method by those without access to milk. The bulgar is mixed with water and salt and formed into small balls to ferment; the balls are then stored in spiced olive oil for a rich taste sensation far cheesier in flavor than any other vegan cheese I’ve tried.” Doesn’t it sound awesome? If you try it, let me know.
• My BFF Christy’s BFF runs this vegan bakery in Portland, doesn’t it look magnificent?
• And finally: New Paltz, why are you so rad? Thank you to the fine upstanding citizen who sent in my Netflix movie when I left it on top of my car and drove away. You could have had a free copy of Boy Culture (a great movie! If you like the tone of Dexter, all dark and internal, but with a happier theme–love–this is the movie for you)!
• Finally finally: it has come to my attention that some of you are reading this blog through something I still don’t entirely understand called an “RSS feed.” This worries me, as I think (but am not sure) that it sends you the content of the blog post as soon as I post it, perhaps even instantly. I usually publish a post then go and check all the links and check for typos and things, so you might get weird mistakes if you are reading it through a reader. But if I’m totally mistaken and this is not what an RSS feed is, then, uh, keep on with it.
• I’m off to have lunch at Strictly Roots, yum!

Oh, the filth! On so many levels!

Shameless friend-of-a-friend plug alert: Here’s a cute little essay from the New York Times, written by my rad pal Mary’s BFF, Joanna. Neato!

I just realized that in the past six months I sent over 3,000 emails. Is it normal for people who do not work in an office to send an average of 17 emails a day, every day, or do I have some sort of disease? A productivity disease, perhaps?

I really enjoyed this Vegan de Guadalupe zine (hooray for zines in 2008!) and bet you would too. It’s sold out, but maybe if you beg she will do a second printing?

Speaking of reading, I stayed up until 5 AM last night reading A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman. It wasn’t as technically well done as, say, Fun Home or Persepolis, but there is absolutely something to be said for the graphic biography format. I always assumed that any additional information I had on Red Emma would only increase my love for her, but I closed the book with a vast sadness and uneasiness. She accomplished a lot and has of course inspired generations, but her sympathy for violent methods of revolutionary action really bothered me, as did the last 15 or so years of her life, which seemed to be all about how the world she worked for was never to be. (Being a nonviolent anarchist, I tend to forget that the vast majority of the world only knows about the violent anarchist faction.) But it was a good read. And you get some juicy “if I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution” details on her complicated and wild not-so-private life.

Speaking of revolutionaries, the always right-on John Robbins (who I’ve been in love with since I was 14, yo, for serious) has a great article on Weston A. Price Foundation and the Nourishing Traditions crazies. The best part is the end:

“I regret to say that those running the Weston A. Price Foundation today seem to have their own agenda. They are proponents of the philosophy that in order to be healthy, people must eat large amounts of saturated fat from animal products. They insist that only with the regular consumption of lard, butter and other full-fat dairy products, and beef, can people derive the nutrients they need to be healthy.

Toward that end, the Foundation has widely publicized an article written by a former member of the Foundation’s Board of Directors, Stephen Byrnes, titled “The Myths of Vegetarianism.”

The article is harshly critical of vegetarian diets, and concludes with an “About the Author” section which states: “Stephen Byrnes… enjoys robust health on a diet that includes butter, cream, eggs, meat, whole milk, dairy products and offal.” In fact, Stephen Byrnes suffered a fatal stroke in June, 2004. According to reports of his death, he had yet to reach his 40th birthday.”

Yikes.

Full disclosure: I like that the Weston A. Price Foundation people have good things to say about fermented foods and coconut butter. I’m not at all above admitting that crazies can be right about some things.

Local folks: The New Paltz Green Party has some good events coming up, won’t you please go to some of them? Like that talk on septic systems? I’m going to go not only because I am the head of the group and don’t always go to the events and this is a very bad trait, but also because I have a septic system and should know more about it. Maybe you do too? Please go!

My, what a tight mycelium you have!

You know how tempeh kind of sucks?

Admit it, it kind of does. I didn’t eat tempeh for about 10 years after I became a vegetarian, because it sort of tastes like ass.

These days I’m a tempeh fiend, however, because I make my own tempeh. Homemade tempeh is nothing like store bought, which has usually been frozen and defrosted and is super old. It’s an industrial product. Homemade tempeh, on the other hand, is full of umami and light mushroomy depth. Fried up homemade tempeh with sea salt is a delight, worthy of getting seriously excited about.

So: today is the day you learn how to make your own tempeh. Not your own tempeh reuben, not your own tempeh with mushroom scaloppine, your own tempeh. From beans and spore. From soy and culture. One legume plus a kickstarter starter plus time equals alchemy.

Homemade tempeh is at once harder and easier than you think. It’s hard because we’ve been inculcated (inoculated, even) to believe that tempeh is inherently weird, that fermentation is a dirty word, and that any recipe longer than 10 minutes is a waste of time.

This is a three day recipe for rotting soybeans. This might make things hard for some of you. For those of us free of those prejudices, tempeh is easy.

Once you know a few general principles and have figured out your incubator situation you can get a batch going in literally minutes. I make five or so pounds a week in less than half an hour for less than two dollars.

The first step to making great tempeh is buying the book Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz. I know I’ve mentioned Sandor a bunch on this blog, but it never hurts to plug awesome people one more time. (In fact I just got an email from him the other day plugging a live fermentation intensive “webinar” he’ll be hosting soon – check it out, yo). Sandor is one of those people you’re just plain glad exist.

Wild Fermentation opened up a whole new world to me, and my tempeh recipe is taken directly from his, so first buy his book for more in-depth info on making tempeh. (Another great, though slightly more bizarre, resource is The Book of Tempeh.) If you want some hilarious fun, read the 1-star and 2-star negative Amazon reviews of Wild Fermentation – of course, the reasons these nuts disliked WF are the reasons I loved it. My favorite is the one that calls him an “Amish homosexual hippie.” YES!!

The second step is making an incubator. Sandor put up all the info on how my pal Aaron and I (OK, mostly Aaron) built my incubator on his website, so you might want to check that out (click on “tempeh incubator” on the little drop-down menu on the right, scroll over the picture to read the text so you understand what you’re looking at). All the info is repasted below as well.

Let’s say for now that you have your incubator. Now you need to order some tempeh spore (also called tempeh starter). I get mine from GEM cultures, so does everyone else I’ve ever heard of who makes tempeh. Let’s hope the good GEM cultures people never get tired of providing us with high-quality starters!

Now you’re ready to go.

Here is my recipe for tempeh – it makes a lot, five or so pounds. Roughly one-third of this recipe will make a nice-sized amount to start.

I usually start soaking the beans Friday night, cook them Saturday in the early afternoon, let them sit for a few hours to dry, then start fermentation on Saturday PM. I have great tempeh by late night on Sunday, or I turn the temperature down to about 85 degrees so it will be ready by Monday AM, depending on my schedule.

1. Soak 7.5 cups of soybeans overnight. Have you ever seen black soybeans? They are fun to use for tempeh. I’ve also had success mixing in smaller amounts of other grains and beans, sea veggies, and spices. Actually, don’t do the spices – the flavor gets lost. And NEVER toss in some leftover unsweetened toasted coconut. (Now that I think about it, most people probably don’t make coconut truffles and thus don’t have leftover coconut always hanging around. Don’t toss in ANY coconut, let’s put it that way.) I adore tempeh and I am madly in love with coconut, but that tempeh had an oily cooked coconut flavor that no one liked. (Have you ever used unrefined coconut oil – the kind they sell in the body care aisle – to make a cake or fry something? It was that kind of flavor. Remember to always buy the refined coconut oil!)

If you can’t soak the beans overnight, just do a quick soak by bringing them to a boil and turning off the heat. Let sit for one hour.

2. Ideally, you now want to chop up each bean into 3 or 4 pieces. I just do a quick chop in the food processor – not too fine, not too chunky. If you have a grain mill by all means use it. I used to skip soaking the beans and would chop dry beans in my Vita Mix Insanity Blender (I think it’s really just called a Vita Mix Blender, but as every Vita Mixer will tell you, the Vita Mixer is insane – I truly think you could make sawdust by tossing chopsticks into it). This works, but I think soaking them then chopping them in the Cuisinart works better.

3. Cook the beans just until done. Not completely soft. The fermentation will finish the cooking.

4. Drain the beans. Sandor tells you to swaddle them with a towel and dry them until they are barely warm and fairly dry. I am way too impatient for this and just spread my beans out on a baking sheet until they are pretty dry.

5. In a couple of hours I toss them with 1 heaping tablespoon of spore and a nice drizzle (5 or so tablespoons) of apple cider vinegar. You can use any vinegar or no vinegar. Sandor’s recipe says to use some, but he recently told me that he doesn’t use it anymore. It’s just there to give the good bacteria more of a jump start over the bad bacteria. Because I do commercial cooking and you can never be too careful, I use it. You’re never in danger of eating tempeh that has gone bad without knowing it, however – you will always know it is bad because it will truly stink and will be slimy and gross and you won’t want to eat it. Fermentation is all about using your instincts – do you want to eat it? If so, it’s fermented enough and good. If not, not. I’ll talk about that more below.

6. Pack the tempeh into bags or trays, following the Wild Fermentation guidelines. I use square Pyrex 9″x9″ glass dishes and spread the tempeh-to-be in a nice even layer, then close it with a clean (never worn, obviously) shower cap with holes poked in it with a fork. (Look at this neato blog post talking about wrapping it in grape leaves!)

When you make tempeh in a Pyrex baking dish, the top and bottom are a little different, since they get exposed to different amounts of air and heat. The top is the darker side, on the right.

I also make it in plastic bags with fork holes poked in them. Because the holes are more exposed to air they get darker:

Once I tried to make round tempeh rolls and was pretty successful. Once I made tempeh in a ceramic pie plate and made a shepherd’s pie in it afterwards, so the tempeh was the crust. It was nice, but not as nice as it would have been with tempeh crumbled and fried up in the filling and a nice flaky pastry crust on the outside. I was really excited about it at the time.

You can also make tempeh in shapes using metal cookie cutters on a baking sheet (if the baking sheet will fit in your incubator). I don’t know exactly why you would do this, but isn’t it fun to not have to make tempeh in the standard 8 oz. slab? Make whatever shapes you want. Try to make the shapes even, however, so the tempeh will ferment evenly. A square is not as good as a rectangle.

7. Pop your tempeh in the incubator, set the temperature, and you’re basically done.

Check it every once in a while. I try to rotate my tempeh once throughout the process, because the tempeh closest to the light bulb obviously gets more hot. I set my incubator at 90 degrees and keep the door open after twelve or so hours. After the first 12 or so hours of fermenting the tempeh’s internal heat will bring the temperature up too high, so I open the door to keep the heat in check. The tempeh is finished in about 24 hours, when it has a tight, even mycelium (network of whitish strands) with some gray and black marks.

Look – magic! You started with beans and a magical powder and added time and a little care, and look what you made! I’m always a little stunned.

8. As Sandor directs, take your tempeh out of the forms and either use it right away or refrigerate it in one layer (not stacked, or it will continue to ferment!) or wrap it in plastic and freeze it.

In the beginning you will constantly be wondering if your tempeh is edible or rotten. It’s edible. Sandor says that your tempeh should smell like a baby or button mushroom. Mushroomy I understand, but I don’t want to smell no babies. If he means that it should smell like my sweet white cat Noodle who keeps herself so clean that she always inexplicably smells of talcum powder, then I see his thinking. Mushroomy and alive and clean is the kind of smell you’re looking for. Your tempeh should be whitish streaked with grey and some black. Red or pink or green tempeh should be thrown out. The Book of Tempeh talks about “overfermented” tempeh, completely black tempeh sold on the streets of Indonesia – it’s just a little more funky, and perfectly fine.

One of the most interesting lessons I learned from Sandor is that the line between fermented and rotten is culturally drawn – isn’t that fascinating? It’s kind of like a weed – a weed is a plant out of place. A rotten ferment is one you don’t feel good about eating. Someone else might eat it and be fine. Someone else might also like dandelions all over their lawn. (I put my dandelions in kimchi, and have the best of both worlds – a pretty lawn and yummy pickles).

Sometimes I am lazy and don’t rotate the tempeh, or I try to jam too much into the incubator and everyone is cramped. Here is some tempeh that didn’t have enough space.

The top corner didn’t really tempeh-ify. I just cut that part off and tossed it into the compost – what could make compost happier than a nice piece of live-culture tempeh?

So, that’s tempeh.

Let’s go back and talk about how to make your incubator. There are many ways of incubating tempeh – in a oven with just the pilot light; in a hot greenhouse; in Phoenix, Arizona. The only tricky thing is that you need to sustain a certain temperature for 24-30 or so hours. That’s why I like the incubator. Here is how my friend Aaron made mine – thanks Aaron!

Get an auto-thermostat thingie kit and a light bulb (not a compact fluorescent, since those don’t get hot), as well as a smallish refrigerator – it doesn’t need to work. If you have a large refrigerator, hook up a fan to circulate the heat. If it’s a small fridge, the light bulb will heat it just fine with no fan. With the auto-thermostat kit, the light bulb turns off automatically when it gets to a certain temperature (I set mine at 88-90 degrees – ideal tempeh fermenting temperatures are 85-90).

Controller with temperature probe that is poking through an existing hole (the probe is the white thing right in front of the cord). The controller is in the freezer section of the fridge.

Shelves made with wooden planks, and the light bulb which is the heating element.

An extension cord runs through the back of the fridge and the temperature controller plugs into the extension cord. Aaron used a lamp repair kit for the light socket, which plugs into the temp controller. The light turns on when temp drops below the selected temperature, and then shuts off when temp is reached.

The cord for the temperature probe was able to be threaded through an existing hole in the back of the fridge, then it was just plugged into the wall. I leave it plugged in all the time and turn the incubator on and off by using the switch on the light bulb.

I painted my fridge orange so it would fit in with my new yellowy and orangey commercial kitchen (pictures coming soon!). This is optional.

Fuckin’ A. Tempeh!

It’s official: I am five weeks behind on my New Yorkers. If you’re waiting with anticipation for the New Yorker stats, kindly wait a little while longer. The kitchen is so lovely though!

Also, ramp season is over and asparagus, radish, and greens season is in full swing in my part of the world.

Did you make ramp pickles? Rick made some that sound divine. Lacking much time but with a whole lot of miscellaneous weeds/herbs*/greens** from the garden/yard and the 9 or so lbs of ramps I couldn’t resist buying even though I took the week off from cooking***, I made a quick-and-dirty ramp kimchi.

From left: comfrey leaves, not-great wild chives, sorrel, and garlic leaves

I have no compunction about calling my pickle kimchi even though it contains no ginger or hot chilies, because the world of kimchi is giant and varied (fish head kimchi, anyone?), and to me anything hugely stinky of scallions and garlic is kimchi.

Technically kimchi is made by immersing cabbage in brine overnight then draining it. The overnight soak is meant to break down cell walls and kick start the fermentation, but because ramps are so leafy and more watery and easily fermented than cabbage, I made the kimchi like sauerkraut, just chopping the ramps coarsely, washing them (always wash greens after chopping them, you know that trick, right?), and tossing them with sea salt, weighting and covering them, and done. The next day I pushed down on the weight to make sure the brine had risen above the greens, and that’s it. There it sits. I’m too lazy to take a picture, but it looks like a lot of greens with a weight (a mortar and pestle) on top in a big crock.

Did you know you can pickle ANYTHING (except ripe tomatoes) like sauerkraut? Sandor Katz told me that, and he was right.

Nine pounds of fermenting ramps greets everyone at the door with a wall of practically visible, eye-watering wild leek smell waves, but it will go into the fridge in a few days and I will get the last laugh when I am mixing delicious wild-crafted ramp-and-foraged-greens kimchi with rice all year long for the best five-minute dinner in the world.

These are 2005’s ramps (and lilacs) – this year’s were much skinnier, with almost no bulb. I think that might be because my forager (a sweet high school kid - no, this is his first year in college! My, how they grow up! – whose mom taught him to forage and who now makes a nice business of it for one month every year) forages in three or more secret ramp fields in the Catskills – maybe these came from a field of thick-bulbed ramps that he has been letting rest for the past few years? Maybe these were from much later in the season? The mysteries of ramps are many.

_____

*Including garlic leaves – did you know that if you stick a clove of garlic in the ground and forget about it, for many years to come you will get edible garlic leaves every spring? I just learned this two years ago, and it still blows me away.

**I also tossed in a lot of sorrel, which grows so well in my garden and I never do anything with it except force guests to eat a leaf because I like watching their faces. Poor poor sour sour sour sorrel.

***For some reason I feel compelled to link to my professional site every time I mention cooking or work in any form, I bet it’s annoying for the three of you who regularly read the old blog…

It’s been a crumby week in my world. Let’s talk about soy.

homemade tempeh

But first: Who knew? Blackle might not the shiz after all. Commentariat Piig helpfully notes: “I did a little research, and it turns out that using Blackle will only save energy if you’re using a CRT monitor. If you have an LCD monitor it actually uses MORE energy. Also, an LCD monitor is more energy efficient than using Blackle with your CRT monitor.” Dang.

Moving on.

It seems that a soy primer might be in order.

I just read an article in Utne Reader that mistakenly stated that “vegans and vegetarians…eat soy as their main source of protein.” – what a crazy made up statement! Many vegetarians eat lots o’ soy, but a vegetarian diet does not require that soy be your primary protein source. We’ve got the wide world of beans, and seitan and nuts and seeds, and most Americans eat way too much protein anyway! (shout out to Diet for a New America, the very first book to teach me that veg 101 fact.).

As with all foods, there are positives and negatives about soy.

These could be stated in one sentence as: processed = bad, traditional and, especially, fermented = good.

Allow me to expand ad nauseam in an offensively judgmental way.
-First, the basic fact that informs all of what we should think about soy: Sometimes healthy foods are seized upon by gigantique rapatious corporations that, by law, must make as much money as possible. The healthy characteristics of these foods are thus tortured out of them and forcibly introduced into as many crap foods as possible so as to make said crap foods seem healthy. Be wary.

-Americans have been duped into thinking that more is better when it comes to soy (and everything) but the fact is that most of the traditional soy products we should be eating are Japanese (miso, tofu, shoyu, tamari, natto) or Indonesian (I heart tempeh) and are traditionally eaten in (relatively) small quantities. The idea of a gigantic block of tofu set quiveringly in the middle of the plate in place of a steak is a strange American one and I feel, somehow, that my hippie parents might be partially to blame. In gigantic quantities, soy – primarily processed soy – can present some health dangers. The right kinds of soy in the right amounts can also present health benefits. Yay.

-In case you don’t know what I mean by “processed soy,” check your local health food store and, increasingly, supermarket. They are packed with crap soy added to random foodish items in the form of soy protein isolate, hydrolyzed soy protein, soy protein powder, etc. Those microwavable chick’n nuggets that you see in the health food store are not actually food.

-Vegans, back me up: this trend of vegan chefs trying to imitate nonvegan desserts by sticking tofu into them has got to go. Not only does raw tofu used as cake frosting give everyone in the world a stomachache, it also requires massive amounts of sugar to achieve a desserty flavor. I know vegans seem to love “cheesecake” made with half sugar, half tofu and a dash of vanilla, but we’ve got to get over this. I know, I know, it tastes strangely cheesecakey. Let’s not talk about why. Let’s just get over it.

Let me now rather dogmatically tell you which soy products you should eat and which you should eschew.

-Soy milk is sort of weird, and let’s admit it. It’s all beany and has a weird chemical flavor. It’s not a whole food so you’re denying yourself of the full nutrition that you only get from whole soy beans. It doesn’t have the thickness and richness I like in baked goods, so I use coconut milk instead. I don’t eat cereal because it’s all 2 years old and ultra-processed by the time it gets to you, but if I did I would honestly make my own almond milk for cereal. What’s wrong with fruit and toast in the morning, though? (Full disclosure: I am never awake during the so-called “morning.”) (Full disclosure #2: I like Peanut Butter Bumpers as a snack and yes, they contain honey.) (Full disclosure #3: I eat scarily-vegan “pink vanilla funfetti” frosting with pretzel sticks when I am depressed.)

-Soy oil is hideously processed and repellent. It also accounts for 80% of all liquid oils consumed annually in the US – most of that because it is so often used a deep-frying oil. (Full disclosure #5: french fries are a treat I would not want to live with out. I also personally own a deep fryer – I just fill it with grape seed oil.)

-Miso is a traditionally fermented, unrefined, super super healthy Japanese soy paste, without which I would also not want to live. Miso is generally overlooked except for the ubiquitous miso soup. I add a tablespoon or two of miso to most of my soups to add richness and depth. Miso thickens sauces and adds a certain round flavor to so many savory dishes. For maximum health benefits it is best not to heat it, but keep in mind that if you really need to heat it (if you’re bringing a sauce to a boil to thicken it, for example), it’s OK. It will still taste wonderful. Miso is expensive, but making your own is wonderfully strange and takes months and costs almost nothing. Let Sandor Katz teach you how.

-Tempeh is a traditionally fermented, unrefined, super super healthy Indonesian soy cake, without which I would also not want to live. Tempeh is relatively inexpensive, but making your own is wonderfully strange, tastes 100% better than store-bought (which, yes, means that store-bought tempeh tastes like nothing) and takes a day and costs almost nothing. Let Sandor Katz teach you how.

-No one, ever, eats natto, so I won’t talk about it.

-Edamame is just a soybean and everyone knows beans are good for you. Actually, it will totally fuck with your digestion if you don’t cook it enough. Make sure your edamame is not GMO.

-Shoyu is traditionally fermented soy sauce and you should make sure you’re buying it instead of a weird refined, GMO kind of crap soy sauce.

-Tamari is wheat-free soy sauce and it is not as good as shoyu – it’s saltier, rougher, and funkier – and you shouldn’t eat it unless you’re trying to avoid wheat and if you are perhaps you should ask yourself why because suddenly we’ve got all these weirdass wheat phobia fetishes lately and it’s getting a little out of control – we’ve been eating wheat for thousands of years and yes we need to not eat so much processed junk white flour crap but aside from that unless you really and truly have celiac disease which you most likely don’t – enough with the wheat phobia.

And that’s soy.

(Now is as bad a place as any to say that I have no idea why WordPress capitalizes odd things in my subject lines. It’s not me, I promise! If you know how to fix it, please tell me.) (Meh. I figured it out. It’s dumb.)

In the past few years I have watched the Slow Food movement’s rise with a mix of happiness and outrage, and it’s time to boil down exactly why it boils my blood so. First, read a little about the Slow Food movement if you are not familiar with what we’re talking about.

I love Slow Food, really I do. How could I not agree that “we are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods….A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.” I like quiet material pleasure. I hate fast food. I’m down!

Except when I’m not. Except when I hate Slow Food. Fucking richie white people’s movement – count me out! Fucking European elitists who only want to “save” “heritage breeds” of animals so they can eat them.

Isn’t there something sickening about that? I know I’m supposed to say that yes, people are going to eat meat, and since they are I should be happy that they are eating them in responsible ways, blah blah. Of course a part of me believes that, but this is my primary beef (um.) with Slow Food – they are stealing vegetarians! Both practicing and could-easily-become vegetarians are being lured away by this whole “ethical meat” michegas bullshit and it’s time that us passionate vegan foodies stand up to be counted in the Slow Food movement so we can change it from the inside.

There are so many wonderful things about the Slow Food thing – better quality food, fair wages for farmers, producers, pickers, etc etc, environmental sustainability – all the shit that vegans are totally down with. But the truth is that Slow Foodies are fucking snobs and look down on vegans because they think they have found The Secret: you can eat as many dead rotting animals as you want if you just find Slow Food-approved ones. They cost a lot more and there’s no way that everyone will be able to eat a Naragansett turkey for Thanksgiving ($4 per lb, which I understand is a lot for a dead turkey. I hope when I die my flesh gets sold by the pound, fun fun fun.), but that’s a small matter. Rich people can eat meat with impunity! Phew!

Not so fast, richie whitie snobs. Vegans aren’t vegan because we want animals to be treated better. You’ve got us all wrong (notice how I hesitate not at all to speak for all vegans) – we don’t think people should be eating animals. Period. It’s a stupid and backwards thing to do, and you’re stupid and backwards if you do it. Vegans work for the abolishment of factory farms only as an intermediary step toward vegan nirvana.

Oh fuck, and now I hear those little voices in my head going on about how people are always going to eat meat and all that shit. It’s just like gay marriage. Or Dennis Kucinich. Gay marriage is a horrible idea, and…well, this is going to take a while to explain. I’ll save it for a separate post.

But Kucinich. Everyone I know likes him the best out all the Democrats (I’ve done a great job weeding people out of my life solely based on overly simplistic political positions, hooray!) – but most of them won’t admit it, because of some stupid word: “electability.” Oh enough with fucking electability already. Why don’t people see that (in the past at least) we are the ones who decides who gets elected, so if we stop whining about “electability” and instead focus on “electing” the person who best fits our values, there would be a real chance that that person could get “elected.”

Same with the damn dead turkeys. We’re so busy finding “better” dead animals to eat that we’re ignoring the larger issue, which is of course that we shouldn’t be eating animals. Simple! No one should get married, Kucinich should get elected, and we shouldn’t be eating animals. Done! What else can we work on today?

Well, that’s the Slow Food thing. Prime examples of the Slow Food problem can be found in several recent books. Let’s talk about them a little bit.

Michael Pollan, I know you know him. He’s a really wonderful writer, and has a lot of excellent points to make about what’s wrong with how we eat today. He just wrote an amazing piece about the Farm Bill for the New York Times Magazine. The Botany of Desire was awesome. That book about building his own house was just fine. Then we got An Omnivore’s Dilemma. Most of it is pretty wonderful. Then he goes into this whole long-ass part about whether or not its ethical to kill and eat animals – and of course he ends up in the Slow Food camp, and here is where I heave a big giant annoyed sigh move on.

(potato tasting – how much more Slow Foodie could you get?)

And so we move on to the lovely and brilliant Barbara Kingsolver. You’ve definitely heard of this Animal, Vegetable, Miracle book. (There are two annoyances already right there in the title, aren’t there?) There are a lot of fascinating tidbits in this tale of the year she spent growing her own food with her (breeder alert!) husband and kids who contribute to the book as well. I of course adore her other books, so this whole let’s-kill-our-own-hogs thing comes as somewhat of a slap in the face. Sadness.

Two more examples and we’ll be done. Slow Foodies love this Nourishing Traditions book, by Sally Fallon. If you fall in with a certain group of Slow Foodies and admit you’re vegan, they will push Nourishing Traditions at you faster than my group will push extra garden zucchini on you in July. The sad thing is that there is a lot I like in the book – it teaches you why fat is your friend, it explains the dangers of too many overly processed soy foods, it really pushes coconut oil. But they seem to think that just because traditional foods like lard can be healthy, no one should be vegetarian. I actually do believe that lard is most likely healthier than trans fat-laden shortenings. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to eat either one!

Update. The perennially perfect John Robbins has a great article explaining how crazy the Nourishing Traditions/Weston A. Price people are – check it out. The best part is at the end!

And finally, my friend Sandor Katz, who wrote the bible on fermented foods. He’s also written a great book called The Revolution Won’t be Microwaved. As a lovely reader recently pointed out to me, this book has a truly horrifying chapter on the virtues of meat. While I’ve been busily praising the book I had totally forgotten about this chapter because I didn’t read a word of it. I did, however, notice that the chapter is called “Vegetarian Ethics and Humane Meat” and the first two references are to my pal/hero Carol Adams and my pals/heros from the Bloodroot Collective, a feminist-vegetarian collective restaurant owned by friend of mine and where I’ve worked for years. So I know that Sandor is veggie-friendly and not hostile, unlike so many other Slow Foodies. He’s maybe just lost his way a little.

All these books (except for Sandor’s) are just incomprehensible to me. So many smart people, who are ordinarily so right on. How could they have failed to see this super simple thing, something I saw with absolute certainty when I was twelve, though I am clearly so much less brilliant then they are?

I am afraid it comes down to laziness (wanting to eat the foods you think you like), and some vague Christian idea of dominion. How sad when people you have so much in common with don’t share deep, fundamental values with you.

Last year I did an interview with the ever-amazing Sandor Katz. It was supposed to run in Clamor magazine, but it closed its doors just before the issue with the interview went to press. So, I put it online here.

A few more links:

Clamor’s excellent profile on American Apparel that will make you loathe them as much as I do (disclaimer: I am wearing AA underwear, an AA undershirt, and an AA t-shirt right now. Sigh. I’m working on it.).

Sandor’s wonderful website.

Buy his previous book, my personal fermentation bible – Wild Fermentation

Buy his current book, the excellent The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved.