To those familiar with the cuisine, a veg-forward Vietnamese cookbook is almost inconceivable. How would you avoid the use of fish sauce, a crucial component of so many dishes? Well, if I’d trust anyone to pull it off, it’s Andrea Nguyen.
When faced with health issues, the food writer and everyone’s favorite Vietnamese cooking teacher set out to give her recipes a plant-based makeover, with minimal amounts of animal protein. “In the late summer of 2019, I hit a wall,” she writes in her seventh cookbook. “I felt cruddy after years of eating everything I wanted, all in the name of professional research.”
She convincingly reverse engineers a vegan fish sauce using pineapple juice and two types of seaweed and pineapple juice. “Kombu contributes a round mouthfeel like that of meat collagen while the wakame injects a briny back note like that of dried seafood,” Nguyen explains.
Her ingenuity extends to the Oven-Fried Crispy Shiitake Imperial Rolls. She skips the traditional deep frying and instead blasts the spring rolls with the high heat of an oven or air fryer until shatteringly crisp. For the beautifully burnished exterior, she has another trick up her sleeve: “Like applying butter to phyllo, brushing seasoned coconut cream on the rice paper wrappers enriches and hydrates them just enough so they’ll seal up and brown to a crisp.”
High-heat cooking is also the key to the deeply caramelized savoriness of her Char Siu Roasted Cauliflower. The signature sweet-smoky flavor is from a combo of pantry ingredients (hoisin sauce, sesame oil, agave syrup, ketchup, soy sauce and five-spice powder) that she slicks onto the vegetables before roasting.
While Nguyen notes that she felt much better after eating less meat and more vegetables, the book is not intended to be a “health” book; rather, it’s a launch pad for having a more diverse diet. “Vegetables are the source of so much creativity in the kitchen,” she says. “Meat you can manipulate in only so many beautiful ways, but the sheer variety of vegetables is infinitely inspiring.”
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