Vegging Out!

The global trend toward vegetarianism is driven not only by veganism, but also, as food writer Yeh Yilan observes, by the fact that vegetarianism is closely connected with the concept of “terroir.” She has written that vegetables overwhelmingly outpace seafood and meat in their diversity and richness. This suggests that the astonishing potential of veggies is far from being fully tapped.

Chao

Carrie Lee and Eric Wu, founders of the well-known vegan restaurant BaganHood, have recently opened Chao, a stir-fry eatery that doesn’t use fish or meat.

A famous creative dish made at Chao: “can’t-find-it stinky tofu.” 

Aside from using a plant-based meat substitute, Chao’s dry-sautéed string beans are made the same way as everybody else’s.

A new era for Taiwanese-style stir-fry

Taiwanese-style stir-fried food has in recent years been a major cuisine of choice for international travelers to Taiwan and a cultural experience not to be missed. For Taiwanese, what are the essential elements of a traditional stir-fry restaurant? These include tanks displaying live fish and shrimp, round tables and stools, steamed fish served on dishes heated by alcohol burners, a clamor of voices, and the consumption of booze. You can find all these things at Chao, the only difference being that there is no seafood and no meat.

This restaurant was established by Carrie Lee and Eric Wu, co-founders of the Taipei-based BaganHood vegan restaurant and The Future food and beverage group. They founded it because they themselves wanted a place to eat vegan stir-fry after work, but there were none. Wu, whom Lee calls a “genius chef,” explains their thinking in planning Chao.

“When people eat stir-fry, they are eating familiar flavors with the customary seasonings,” says Wu. Familiar terms like shacha (a kind of barbecue sauce), kung pao, or sweet and sour all bring corresponding fragrances and sauce flavors to the minds of Taiwanese. Behind these downhome and classic dishes there are the deeply embedded taste memories of Taiwan’s residents. Lee avers: “So long as there is that sense of familiarity in the flavor, then people will be satisfied.” But what about the meat? She suggests: “That’s not a central concern.”

Looking over the menu at Chao, there are at least 30 dishes, including classics like pineapple and shrimp balls, shacha beef, kung pao chicken, green beans with pork intestine, Hakka stir-fry, and basil-flavored rice mixed with animal blood. There are also Asian-style offerings such as cod with chopped peppers, stir-fried rice noodles with beef, and nyonya fish curry, as well as totally novel creations like “can’t-find-it stinky tofu.”

Wu’s technique is substitution by subterfuge, though meat-eaters may have their suspicions. “Pineapple shrimp balls” consist of chewy konjac with a mayonnaise coating; “rice blood” is made with purple rice cake; and the chicken in “kung pao chicken,” the beef in “shacha beef,” and the fish in “cod with chopped peppers” are all plant-based meat substitutes that are very realistic. In addition, Wu uses plant-based eggs to make stir-fried egg with manganji pepper and fermented black beans.

One could say that, by taking advantage of the progress made in the latest generation of vegetarian processed products, Chao is taking the fun of mimicry to its highest point. The restaurant also offers a path forward for people who want to switch over to vegetarianism, or, like Lee and Wu, to veganism.

Stir-frying vegetarian food in a wok over high heat produces intense “wok hei,” delivering the same satisfying and hearty experience as meat dishes—and diners won’t even notice it’s vegetarian!

Braised pork on rice made with a plant-based meat substitute is thickened with sugar, producing an oily and sticky texture. Topped with vegetarian meat floss, its flavor and mouthfeel are virtually indistinguishable from the meat-based original.

Little Tree Food

Little Tree Food, a tranquil urban oasis, has earned both the Michelin Bib Gourmand recommendation and the Michelin Green Star for its excellence and sustainability.

Going the extra mile for flavor 

Little Tree Food, founded in 2017, is perhaps the most successful vegetarian brand in the marketplace. Riding the tide of corporate environmental, social, and governance targets, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and the drive for net-zero carbon emissions, this brand has long since expanded beyond its own storefronts and now works with many famous corporations.

Back in the day, founder Jeffery Liu noticed that there was a potential undeveloped “blue ocean” market for vegetarian food and beverages. In fact, he was inspired by the vegan trend in the West. But at that time there were no precedents for novel vegetarian foods in Taiwan, and when Liu’s business first opened, executive chef Tim Hsu admits, their offerings were stereotypical traditional vegetarian cuisine, and “even I didn’t like it.”

But the lack of customers gave him time to think, and he decided to come out with 100 “small dishes” to serve diners and test the market reaction. The food echoed his background in Sichuan fare, and he also changed direction toward Western cuisine. The foods he made encompassed Chinese and Western, sweet and savory, including crepes, scallion pancakes, and fried dough sticks in sesame flatbread…. He even tried adding Western herbs to scallion pancakes to create a fusion feel. Little did he expect that customers would respond with enthusiasm.

Although not one of the small dishes launched at that time is still being made by the company, that initial step paved the way for Little Tree’s exploration of a “menu without borders.” Today they offer options like the long-popular chili oil, preserved egg and tofu dumplings, as well as “Buddha Bowls” consisting of fried rice with zucchini, chickpeas, guacamole, and spinach. In recent years they have also come out with American southern fried chicken cobranded with the Koloko label of Lian Hwa Foods. This was originally intended as a short-term special, but customers have liked it so much that it has remained on the menu.

Tim Hsu is determined not to use any ready-made processed ingredients. This may be because he is afraid that the cuisine will taste “too vegetarian” or perhaps because he is afraid that over-reliance on ready-made foods will mean his own skills will decline, but the most important reason, he says, is that using them would “kill creativity.”

Nonetheless, cooking is often restricted by classic methods and stereotypical notions. Hsu therefore asks himself: “If I want to make X, but I don’t have any Y, how could I do it?” Take for example his mapo tofu. He has tried replacing the ground meat usually used in this dish with finely diced mushrooms or crisp fried soybean crumbs made from okara (the residue left over after soybeans are processed to make soy milk or tofu). What about grilled eel over rice without the eel? He mimics this fish with Japanese eggplant. He first slices the eggplant and cuts fine lines in it, then uses the “sous vide” technique, in which food is sealed in a vacuum bag and cooked in a water bath at a controlled low temperature for an extended period, to soften the eggplant, after which he adds unagi sauce, allows it to marinate, and finally grills it to bring out the oil. The texture is very realistic.

Hsu likes to use smoking to add fragrance to his food, creating the illusion of meat. Dried cauliflower from Penghu, dehydrated in the sea winds and ground into a fine powder, has a strong salty ocean flavor that adds a deep umami taste to his food. He also takes scraps and offcuts such as onion skins and carrot peel, adds salt to promote lactic acid fermentation, then air-dries them after fermentation and simmers them down into an intensely flavorful broth.

Are there any other innovative methods that can be adopted? How can consuming vegetarian foods be made more pleasurable and satisfying? These are core questions that Hsu thinks about. Though the answers are not easy, “this in fact is the charm of vegetarian food.”

Chili oil, preserved egg and tofu dumplings were inspired by the side dish “preserved egg and tofu.”

The “Buddha Bowl,” made with a wide variety of ingredients.

Little Tree Food executive chef Tim Hsu has been in charge of its kitchens since the firm opened.

Green Bakery

Isabella Tsao founded Green Bakery, a purely vegan shop that is a well-known destination for many foreign vegans.

Pastries without eggs, milk, or butter?

Green Bakery, in Taipei’s Minsheng Community, prepares its foods entirely from plants. The small space seats only 25 customers, and is not conveniently located for mass transit, but it attracts travelers from Europe, the Americas, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. It has received a five-star recommendation from the vegetarian website ­HappyCow.

Founder Isabella Tsao was inspired to begin vegan baking by seeing a documentary called Earthlings. Since then 15 years have passed, seemingly in the blink of an eye. The fact is that it is extremely difficult for a pastry chef to try to maintain the ideal of pure veganism. After all, the main ingredients for pastries, especially Western-­style pastries, are almost all products of animal origin. In her effort to protect animal rights, Tsao had to ask herself: “Is it possible to do without eggs, milk, and butter?”

Traditional pastries date back over a millennium, so there are long-standing recipes to which to refer. However, vegan baking has evolved from fragmentary beginnings to an embryonic scale only over the last 20 or 30 years. In short, everyone is still in the experimental stage.

Although veganism originated in the West, it wasn’t really feasible for Tsao to just follow Western recipes. For whatever reason—that such recipes produced food that looked good but didn’t taste good, or didn’t suit Taiwanese palates—ultimately she had to abandon simply following established methods. She decided: “Relying on Mother Nature is the way to go.”

There are deep connections between plant-based ­cuisine and the local terroir. Learning from repeated ­failures, Tsao came up with many methods to use Taiwanese products to replace animal products.

The optimal ingredients for replacing milk have turned out to be bland-flavored plant-based milks, such as soy milk and rice milk. Meanwhile, products that are inherently sticky, such as bananas, chia seeds, and even sweet potatoes and pumpkins, make excellent substitutes for eggs. In place of butter, one can use coconut oil or sunflower oil. In a fit of inspiration, she decided to replace honey—off-limits to vegans—with longan flowers, which taste the same as longan honey.

Eventually she discovered that without the rich taste of milk, eggs, and butter, the flavors of the main ingredients in her pastries came to the fore. Moreover, some alternative ingredients, like sweet potatoes and pumpkins, are inherently sweet, making it possible to reduce the amount of added sugar in her recipes.

For Tsao’s “Yushan tart,” which symbolizes Taiwan’s highest peak, the white peak (the upper layer) is made with the coolness of lemon; the verdant greenery (the lower layer) is concocted with the herbal flavor of sweet potato leaves; and the dark ore veins inside are represented by rich-tasting sesame. Another dish, her strawberry mousse, requires making crème pâtissière (pastry custard) from strawberries and cashews; moreover, she eschews using digestive biscuits and butter for the base, instead using crushed dried cranberries and dried walnuts to produce a gluten-free crust.

The recipes for Tsao’s pastries are not completely fixed and are still subject to sudden change and frequent improvements. But each and every one represents an important step forward in the development of vegan pastries. 

A pastry made without eggs, milk, or butter. What looks like a cream topping is a substitute made from cashews and soy milk.

Relying on the bounty of Mother Nature, pastries made with plant-based ingredients instead of animal products are not overwhelmed by the flavors of eggs, milk, and butter, allowing the taste of the main ingredients to shine through.

Green Bakery and the 0km restaurant have collaborated to create French-style pastries inspired by Taiwan’s mountains. The stylish modern presentation is dazzling to the eye.