Meat Foods I Have Not Missed

A companion piece, for your reference. 

Raw Chicken
I don't care how you cook it, the fact that it was recently a gooey pink gibbet of pathogens freaks me out. 

Raw Beef
How can you not feel like a murderer just looking down the meat aisle?  It looks like what you'd see after you set about yourself with the katana in Left 4 Dead 2. 

Iridescent ham or roast beef
This has got to be a bad sign. 

Hamburger
If you buy it pre-made, it is made from ONE MILLION COWS, as well as all the cows those cows ever had sex with.  Think about it. 

Octopus
The worst possible combination of rubbery and intelligent.  Each tentacle is has as many nerves and moral feelings as a mouse's brain, perhaps. 

Scallops
Pointless, chewy.

Clams, mussels, molluscs generally
I just hate eating something's eliminatory organs. This goes for shrimp and their "sand vein" as well.  

Rattlesnake
Tasted this the last time I was in Colorado in an attempt to be cosmopolitan.  What does it taste like?  No idea.  It was prepared as a falafel, and the snake meat was completely imperceptible.  This experience is characteristic of other exotic meats I've tasted, such as ostrich and venison. 

Salmon
Just never liked it that much.  Best as sashimi, I suppose.

Any kind of white fish
Ditto. 

Puppy
Awfully gamy. 

Bacon-wrapped bananas
Nauseating. 

Veal
Associated with my most serious ever bout of food poisoning, plus it is an adorable baby cow.

Poultry fetuses cooked in the shell (mao dan or balut)
This is as close as you'll see me come to expressing an opinion which is anti-abortion.

Meat Foods I Have Missed

I thought I'd keep a running tally of foods that I enjoyed a lot as a meat-eater, pined for as a vegetarian, then used my newfound cooking skills to recreate.  After some consideration, I've excluded recipes where the flavour comes from heavy spicing and the meat is sort of a blank center point, e.g. curries, buffalo wings, that sort of thing.  I never want for those.  Also burgers.  The state of veggie burgers is fine. 

French Dip sandwich
My favorite thing made from a cow.  Easily recreated with sliced portabello mushrooms and tons of garlic.
Satisfaction: High

Tuna Salad Sandwich
Very successfully recreated with cold crumbled tofu and vinegar.  My partner enjoyed this moist sandwich not one bit.
Satisfaction: Mixed

Unagi
The buttery, tender flesh of eels is one of the last things I gave up on my course from pescetarian to proper vegetarian.  Hit on the solution to this one after frying tofu marinated in alcohol a few days ago.  Made some kabayaki sauce to put on it and I was in non-hog heaven.
Satisfaction: High

Ham
It's a struggle.  The grocery store won't sell me any liquid smoke.  I use some quorn lunchmeat right now. 
Satisfaction: Low

Bacon
Lots of work has been done on this by eminent bacon scholars.  There's baco-bits for your baked potato, veggie rashers for your bacon sandwich, and smoked cheddar for anything that takes bacon and cheese.  As to streaky bacon, I haven't really attempted a remake due to the aforementioned liquid smoke issue. 
Satisfaction: Moderate

Sausage
I've posted about this before.  Morningstar sausages also provide that greasy wrongness you want in a full breakfast sometimes.  
Satisfaction: Perfect

Braunschweiger
I like how it tastes of liver.  Haven't really tried recreating it, but Marmite has a nice kind of metallic organ-meat quality.
Satisfaction: Untested

Short ribs
Heartbreaker.  There's lots of good barbeque options for the veggie, but nothing is quite like using your low incisors to scrape the smooth muscle off a jerk-glazed pig bone.  I'm just saying. 
Satisfaction: Low 

Crispy Duck
Of all the ghoulish things I miss about meat, it's eating that layer of crispy, fatty waterfowl skin that I miss most.  There's apparently a couple of Asian solutions to this: Buddha Duck, which is made of stacked tofu skins, and mock duck, which is made of wheat gluten.  I've managed to find neither in Boulder or Scotland as yet. 
Satisfaction: Pending

Chicken wings
The good thing about these was eating all the flesh, then chewing the cartilage, then cracking the bones with my teeth and sucking out the marrow like it was crab meat.  But I also just like dark meat on a chicken.  I'm not going to bake any false bones and then fill them with marmite or something.  It's not worth it. 
Satisfaction: Not to be had

Crab
Is crab delicious, or is it just something vaguely saline that you can dip into lemon butter?  Think about it.  It's more the activity I miss here, the cracking and picking.  Replaced that by buying walnuts in the shell. 
Satisfaction: w/e

Beef Jerky
Again, it's less that I like the actual food, which is just beef, and more that I love taking something very tough and fibrous to pieces with my teeth.  There's plenty of vegetarian options for something tough and fibrous, believe you me.
Satisfaction: At peace 


When I started this list, the intention was to demonstrate that anything you miss as a meat eater, you can substitute as a vegetarian.  As I went through the things I liked eating when I ate meat, however, I found that many of my pleasures were bound inextricably to the consumption of animal parts.  It wasn't a question of taste or texture, but rather my enjoyment at using my hands and teeth and tongue to render those things that had made an animal able to live--its connective tissues, bones, and organs--into energy for myself. 

The capacity to enjoy meat is hardwired in me, and it would certainly be easy enough to pursue its pleasures.  But enjoyment isn't a moral imperative.  We can weigh our pleasures against the harm they cause and make decisions that both minimize harm and make us happy.  Frankly, I think if more people would accept this premise, I'd hear fewer of them assert that a monogamous bisexual is a contradiction in terms.

Love Sausage and Respect the Law

I get a good amount of flak from meat-lovers about being a vegetarian who likes the taste of meat.  Most of them regard it as the height of folly to decline to eat something which is delicious, and a delusion to try and replace meat for any purpose.  And of course I find more people who are suspicious of the very idea of cooking in the meat-eating camp than among veggos, probably by necessity. 

There are more cogent arguments as well--an ethical, local meat industry is developing, and it's a lot easier to source one cut of beef than a jar of coriander if it's sustainability and cruelty to humans I'm concerned about (it is).  I don't know that vegetarianism is necessarily the most ethical choice all the time, so I try to present it rhetorically to others as a matter of personal preference (it is).  On the rare occasions I actually eat meat, it's the texture that's offputting: impossible not to think of my own body rent and flayed when I'm pulping muscle fibers between my molars. The taste, however, is very nice. 

Now, my partner and I are different kinds of vegetarian.  We both like animals and dislike the thought of eating their flesh, but for the most part he genuinely dislikes the smell and taste of cooking meat.  There are a few things he misses, though--chicken, mainly.  But when I mentioned the idea of recreating the Scottish sausage known as square slice, he perked right up.  This recipe has become one of his favorites, something we both enjoy on a roll or with tattie scones. 

This recipe, then, has at its heart a Vegan Dad recipe for sausage.  The first changes I made to it were to take it further from the Seitan O'Greatness, which I have always hated.  So paprika and nutritional yeast were out, as well as fennel seed and oregano.  For some reason I find that oregano always makes bitter sausages.  After a while the puréed beans dropped out as well.  What I had at this point was a pure wheat gluten log of variable size, prepared with soy sauce, vegetarian boullion, and sesame oil (which always has the effect of convincing my tongue I'm eating meat).  I mix some powdered ginger, garlic, and onion into the flour because they add to the meatiness without adding bulk or moisture. 

Pictured: some seitan. 

Wheat gluten, or seitan, is probably the best meat substitute out there.  Tofu never has quite the right texture, being either too soft if I prepare it or too chewy if I leave it to Asian restauranteurs, plus it's the devil to try to get spices to penetrate to its interior.  TVP only works for dishes that want mince.  Beans and mushrooms are tasty, but they usually have better uses.  Commercial meat substitutes like Quorn can be good, but usually taste like feet.  Seitan is as neutral as bread but takes flavours readily, and it can be prepared with any texture you like (boiled for juicy and soft, steamed for chewy-but-tender, baked for dense) with a minimum of effort.  If you're vegetarian and untouched by celiac disorder, you've definitely had seitan in a commercial veggie burger. 

Around this time we had developed a taste for a certain frozen meal, Aunt Bessie's vegetarian toad in the hole, consisting of a couple sausages in frozen Yorkshire pudding batter in a little tin.  I copied the spices off the back: coriander, nutmeg, thyme, sage, parsley.  I guessed at the amounts and added them to the flour, carefully omitting parsley. 

I started experimenting with other additives besides spices, mainly to cut the rubbery quality steamed seitan can have.  Grated cheese was one of the first things I tried, along with minced fried onion.  The cheese stuck to the foil and created hard little pockets in the seitan, while the onion had the opposite problem and just slid away when the log was cut.  An egg seemed to improve the texture without these downsides.  It was later, when I started making pakoras all the time, that I added a bit of gram flour, which has a distinctive flavour and makes it hold together better.  And of course I'm always looking for ways to put MSG into things, so Maggi seasoning, in both its liquid and cube forms, has been a godsend.  I decided to add TVP on a whim one day and it's been the best decision in the whole sausage-making process. 

Innovations in the mixing stages mainly had to do with the preparation of the TVP and the amount of water.  This part was a total bastard.  Eventually I stopped trying to wing it and measured everything out by weight.  As for cooking, I've not deviated very much from the standard instruction to steam for 45 minutes.

Here, then, is my favourite recipe, tested exhaustively by me.  It's quite forgiving, so I encourage you to experiment and find out what works for you. 

Seitan Square Slice
Prep time: 20 minutes
Cook time: 45 Minutes
Yield: 750 g, two good-sized sausage logs

Spice Mix
    1 teaspoon ground coriander seed
    1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
    1 teaspoon ground ginger
    1 teaspoon onion powder
    1/2 teaspoon cayenne
    1/2 teaspoon black pepper
    1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
    1/2 teaspoon thyme
    1/2 teaspoon sage
    1/2 teaspoon rosemary

    1 1/2 cup (180 g) wheat gluten
    1/4 cup (25 g) gram flour (If you can't find this, leave it out.) 

    1/2 cup/40 g soya mince/TVP
    1 tablespoon sesame oil
    1+ tablespoon butter
    2 - 3 tablespoons Maggi seasoning (or 4 cubes)
    around 1 2/3 cup/400 ml water
    1 egg

Dissolve boullion in 400 ml boiling water, then stir in TVP, butter and sesame oil, and a bit of the spice mix.  Allow to cool to a temperature that won't cook an egg before adding the egg. 

Combine remaining spice mix and flours in a dry bowl.  Turn in the cooled mince mixture and soaking liquid and stir with a fork until well-mixed.  You don't need to knead it, just make sure everything's wet.  Let it sit for a half hour or so in the fridge, then knead if you like. I tend not to, because it's pretty much like squeezing a bunch of oily meat.  The next stage is what determines the density, anyhow. 

Cut the dough into two pieces, and place each piece on a sheet of foil.  Roll up in a short fat log & steam for 45 minutes.  Let it cool until you can handle it, then pop it in the fridge.  When it's cool, it'll be sliceable and you can fry it up or use it in other dishes as you would any cooked sausage. 

Half of this recipe (one log) will fill 500 g puff pastry as sausage rolls.