stark wrote:i'll be honest, i would rather eat fresh meat from the butchers ( yours wasn't very good by the sounds of it, selling rotting flesh an' all) than some nasty artificially flavoured goop.
I don't understand why vegetarians, like so many other derranged cultsd, get drawn into trying to match the competition with shoddy approximations of things that they don't have rather than just going ahead with their own thing and trying to do it well.
I'm sure there are many things made out of vegetables that are nicer than the nicest fake meat.
stark wrote:i'll be honest, i would rather eat fresh meat from the butchers ( yours wasn't very good by the sounds of it, selling rotting flesh an' all) than some nasty artificially flavoured goop.
I don't understand why vegetarians, like so many other derranged cultsd, get drawn into trying to match the competition with shoddy approximations of things that they don't have rather than just going ahead with their own thing and trying to do it well.
I'm sure there are many things made out of vegetables that are nicer than the nicest fake meat.
well quite. ( though not the deranged cults bit ) i had some lovely leeks in cheese sauce topped with mash potato last night and it was extremely good.
tonight some homemade cream of celeriac soup
and on monday , pasta with green pesto.
clearly in between all this veggie frenzy i shall be also eating some chicken and bacon.
The reality is some veggie diets are lacking in protein and this is what is being gotten from tofurkey etc. but of course the processed yuckyness is not confined to veggie *meats* theres plenty of gash meat in the omnivore section of tescos* which would make you a bit squeamish.
gumboot wrote:
I don't understand why vegetarians, like so many other derranged cultsd, get drawn into trying to match the competition with shoddy approximations of things that they don't have rather than just going ahead with their own thing and trying to do it well.
I'm sure there are many things made out of vegetables that are nicer than the nicest fake meat.
I dont eat the quorn\synthomeats stuff - its horrible. A veg diet can be fine for protein - you just need to know what your doing.
I like quorn and eat a fair bit of it. You have to pick the form its moulded into though. Fake chicken fillets and burgers are okay, but the quorn mince is pretty vile.
I recently got into all your quorn stuff, specifically the chilli burgers - microwave in one minute, tasty and nice texture... a good change from the burgers I'd been having previously... but then Sainsbury's changed the deal on all such quorniness from "two for one" to "buy three, get fourth free" and now the prices are back to normal and they want me to pay £2 for two of these burgers. Bollocks to that, their profit margin must be immense.
Shame, as I'd be more into that sort of stuff at 25p a burger or whatever is actually reasonable. Non meat food you just grow, then process. Meat you grow stuff for, rear and kill and process and then eat... that should always cost more, surely?
The chippy over the road from work charges more for veggieburgers than beef or chicken. Unsettling.
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Goatboy wrote:I recently got into all your quorn stuff, specifically the chilli burgers - microwave in one minute, tasty and nice texture... a good change from the burgers I'd been having previously... but then Sainsbury's changed the deal on all such quorniness from "two for one" to "buy three, get fourth free" and now the prices are back to normal and they want me to pay £2 for two of these burgers. Bollocks to that, their profit margin must be immense.
Shame, as I'd be more into that sort of stuff at 25p a burger or whatever is actually reasonable. Non meat food you just grow, then process. Meat you grow stuff for, rear and kill and process and then eat... that should always cost more, surely?
The chippy over the road from work charges more for veggieburgers than beef or chicken. Unsettling.
Maybe its to do with economy of numbers? The demand for Quorn must be waaayyyy less than the demand for meat.
gumboot wrote:I'm sure there are many things made out of vegetables that are nicer than the nicest fake meat.
Depends on the fake meat - in some uses, cooked gluten (i.e. strong flour without the starch) makes an awesome meat substitute. No idea why it's not more popular.
Mock Duck is gluten, and can be great. It's also really easy to make yourself - just kneed some flour+water dough under a tap or in a bowl 'till you've washed the starch out.
Some meat-substitutes are okay, but tend to be nice on their own merits rather than meat-like. The Quorn mushroom burgers are particularly pleasant (although a confusion tautology since quorn is a mycoprotein anyway).
aureole wrote:Some meat-substitutes are okay, but tend to be nice on their own merits rather than meat-like.
Exactly! I try to tell people the same thing about instant mash potato. No, it doesnt taste like mash, but what it does taste like is nice in its own way.
As far as Quorn goes, the pieces and the mince are basically flavourless. So long as you put them with something, they taste fine. A Chili con carne made with Quorn, is just as nice as one made with Beef, if you ask me.
We treat tofu (& other 'textured soya proteins')wrong in the west anyway - using it very much as a meat substitute for veggies (although a balanced mix of various pulses would do as well)
On a recent visit to Taiwan, I was introduced to the true way of 'Do-fu' (& learnt how hard it is to translate chinese to english - as the pronuciation of to 'Do' at the front is very short - to rhyme with the 'to' in toffee but more of a d sound, anyway I digress) Street vendors there (& I suppose in mainland china) do a fantastic deep-fried smooth dofu (as opposed to the 57 other varieties of dofu), seasoned with chilli & 5-spice, which is fantastic in ways I cannot describe - crunchy, spicy, creamy. Mmm...
Mr Dom wrote:We treat tofu (& other 'textured soya proteins')wrong in the west anyway - using it very much as a meat substitute for veggies (although a balanced mix of various pulses would do as well)
On a recent visit to Taiwan, I was introduced to the true way of 'Do-fu' (& learnt how hard it is to translate chinese to english - as the pronuciation of to 'Do' at the front is very short - to rhyme with the 'to' in toffee but more of a d sound, anyway I digress) Street vendors there (& I suppose in mainland china) do a fantastic deep-fried smooth dofu (as opposed to the 57 other varieties of dofu), seasoned with chilli & 5-spice, which is fantastic in ways I cannot describe - crunchy, spicy, creamy. Mmm...
I had something very similar at a Chineses restaurant in Cambridge once. Was very nice. Deep fried. Crisp on the outside, really light and smooth on the inside.
Another vote here for deep-fried tofu, but beware, in China there's slight variation on the theme involving fermented (well, rotten, basically) tofu, and it's absolutely foul and therefore near the top of the list of Chinese delicacies.
It's the smell that's the killer, you don't want to be down wind of it at all, though the taste is actually not that bad.
Chunk wrote:
As far as Quorn goes, the pieces and the mince are basically flavourless. So long as you put them with something, they taste fine. A Chili con carne made with Quorn, is just as nice as one made with Beef, if you ask me.
I'd say that the textured soya mince (dehydrated stuff) is considerably nicer than cheap or medium priced beef mince, and easier and safer to cook with.
I think the other point I have on fake meat is - for heavily processed stuff, you can get away with either: cheap sausages, hot dogs or mince are worse than the veggie alternatives. When you get to identifiable lumps of meat, leave well enough alone.
