Ingredients Glossary

AGAR: Agar is made from different forms of red algae, and it can take the place of gelatin in plant-based recipes. Unlike gelatin, agar is 80 percent fiber, and it is considered to promote weight loss. In manufacturing, agar is used to gel, keep moist, create texture in, and thicken foods. It comes in bars, sticks, and flakes, but for our purposes, you’ll be buying powdered agar. It’s expensive, but you only use a little bit in a recipe. Look for it in bulk at your local natural-foods store, where you can buy just as much as you need.

ARROWROOT POWDER: This pure white starch is made from the tubers of the Maranta arundinacea plant. When it is used for thickening sauces, it makes a clearer gel than cornstarch or tapioca. It has a very neutral flavor, and adding it to your mock meats helps make them firm and smooth without adding any taste.

BEET POWDER: In some recipes, you’ll be using beet powder, which is made from dried beet juice. It’s often clumpy, so if you see lumps, press it through a fine mesh screen strainer before using and mix it with the liquids in the recipe, instead of with dry ingredients. It’s often used to make pasta and is sold in bulk at natural-foods stores. Keep some around to make mock meats, and you’ll have it on hand to add a spoonful to your smoothie, for a blast of beet goodness.

BULGUR: This ancient “instant” wheat form is steamed, chopped, and dried. As such, it can easily be rehydrated with a quick simmer in water or stock. In these recipes, it’s used to give mock meats a chunky, chewy texture. It can be swapped, one for one, with TVP/TSP.

CHICKPEA FLOUR: Chickpeas, or garbanzo beans, can be ground into a high-protein, nutritious flour. If you’ve ever ordered pakora at an Indian restaurant, you’ve had chickpea flour. It’s become easier to find in recent years because it’s used in gluten-free baking, as well. Chickpea flour is used in many of these recipes to give them a smoother texture without making them too soft.

COCONUT OIL: This oil was the victim of a smear campaign in the 1980s, when American vegetable oil producers wanted to knock out the competition from inexpensive coconut oil. They successfully lobbied to get coconut oil branded as an unhealthy, saturated fat. Technically, it is a saturated fat, but in a different way than animal fat, and there is no association between eating coconut oil and cardiovascular disease. It’s a handy fat for plant-based meats because it becomes firm at room temperature and provides a pleasing, rich mouthfeel. Look for refined coconut oil, which has a mild flavor that won’t make all your dishes taste like coconut.

FRONTIER NATURAL PRODUCTS BEEF-FLAVORED BROTH POWDER: This mock beef broth powder, which is widely available at online retailers, is made from a mix of onion, garlic, spices, corn syrup solids, and autolyzed yeast. Like many of our add-ins, it provides umami and a meaty mouthfeel. Autolyzed yeast is simply yeast that has been broken down by naturally occurring enzymes from within the yeast itself to create the umami-synergizing chemicals discussed in the umami section. Some of those chemicals are glutamates, but they’re not the same as monosodium glutamate (MSG). If you don’t want to use it, substitute nutritional yeast.

FRONTIER NATURAL PRODUCTS CHICKEN-FLAVORED BROTH POWDER: This broth powder is made with corn syrup solids, salt, maltodextrin (a vegetable-based, refined starch) yeast extract, natural flavors, herbs, and spices. It’s very chicken-y and yellow, and the yeast in it gives your mock meats umami. If you don’t want to use it, substitute nutritional yeast.

KITCHEN BOUQUET: Kitchen Bouquet is a sauce designed to create a browned surface on foods, especially meats. It’s made from caramel, a mixture of vegetables (carrots, onions, celery, parsnips, turnips, parsley, salt, and spices) and small amounts of sodium benzoate and sulfites. If you want to avoid those, you can melt sugar in a pan and cook it to dark amber, then add vegetable stock to make a pourable sauce.

LIQUID SMOKE: Liquid smoke is water that’s been exposed to smoke and then boiled down to concentrate the flavor. A little goes a long way, and it imparts a dark color. If you want to cut down on the amount of salt in a recipe that calls for smoked salt, use a little liquid smoke to give it the same smoky flavor. When shopping for liquid smoke, check the ingredients: you only want water and natural smoke flavor, not a bunch of other stuff.

MISO: This fermented paste is made from soybeans, grains, nuts, or a combination of these ingredients. The raw ingredients are steamed or boiled, inoculated with a koji bacterial culture, and then left to ferment. The fermentation breaks down the proteins, builds umami, and also makes the food more digestible. Many protective chemicals present in soybeans become much more available to the body once fermentation is complete. There are many varieties of miso paste, and a new wave of fermenters are making unique and delicious misos from hazelnuts and local grains—so look for those. For the recipes in this book, you’ll just want classic red, dark, and white miso pastes. Red and dark (also brown) miso pastes are made from soy and grains and are fermented longer than white (the longer a miso is fermented, the darker and stronger it gets). One intense, aged miso is known as hatcho miso; you can use it in place of red miso paste, but use a little less of it. White miso paste is made from soy and rice, is sweeter and milder, and is fermented for a shorter amount of time.

NUTRITIONAL YEAST: A variety of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, nutritional yeast is grown on molasses or another source of sucrose, washed, fortified with vitamin B-12, and dried into small or large flakes. If you’re a vegan, adding nutritional yeast to your diet is a good idea: 2 tablespoons of the yellow flakes provide 8 mcg of B-12, which is 130 percent of the recommended daily amount, and it’s very high in protein, too. Its high levels of natural glutamates give it lots of meaty umami qualities, and it’s often described as tasting “cheesy.” Small amounts of it are used to make mock meats throughout this book, and it’s also used to make the Vegan Mac and Cheese recipe on page 136 taste like good old-fashioned cheddar.

SMOKED PAPRIKA: Smoked paprika is a Spanish tradition. As with Mexico’s chipotle peppers, whole peppers are smoked, dried, and then ground. Paprika is a sweet, relatively mild chili pepper, and its powder imparts the characteristic reddish orange color and smoky flavor expected in many kinds of charcuterie and sausage.

SMOKED SALT: Salt that’s cooked over a fire absorbs a smoky flavor. There are many varieties of smoked salt, which use different kinds of wood to impart unique tastes and scents. Some are very strong and dark in color, and I find those overwhelming. When buying smoked salts for use in these recipes, look for a pale, fine salt. I bought a big bag of hickory salt that was reasonably priced online.

TAMARI SOY SAUCE: This ancient Japanese form of soy sauce was originally a byproduct of the miso-making process. The gluten-free tamari you can buy at your local natural-foods store is a handy way to add umami, as well as a deep soy-sauce flavor, to foods.

TAPIOCA: A fine white starch made from the tubers of the cassava plant, tapioca is available in powder form (tapioca flour) or various sizes of “pearls,” which are tiny spheres of starch. Tapioca will not gel properly in the presence of acidic ingredients.

TVP/TSP: Textured vegetable protein or TVP (also known as textured soy protein or TSP) has been around for years—it was invented in the 1960s by Archer Daniels Midland to either augment or replace meat. I first saw it being used to secretly stretch out the taco meat in a fast food restaurant where I worked in the late 1970s. It’s made by grinding soybeans and removing their fat and fiber; what remains is at least 50 percent protein. The resulting mash is spun into fibers that are formed into granules and other forms that mimic meat. Some concerns about soy processing can be allayed by choosing organic soy products. They are never genetically modified, and toxic solvents for extracting oil are not allowed. Look for TSP made with whole, non-GMO soybeans. In these recipes, you can substitute bulgur for TVP, if you prefer; just use the same measurements.

VITAL WHEAT GLUTEN: This product is made from wheat flour, but most of the starch is removed, leaving the high-protein gluten behind. Wheat flour contains the precursors to gluten, glutenin and gliaden, which only become gluten when mixed with water. To make seitan, wheat flour is mixed with water, kneaded to activate the gluten, and then rinsed and kneaded over and over again with cool water to remove the starches. Now manufacturers have made life easier for us by making vital wheat gluten.

I spoke to Brook Carson, the vice president for production, development, and marketing at Manildra Group USA, a company that makes vital wheat gluten. She assured me that the process is simple and natural. “Making vital wheat gluten is essentially the same process as making seitan: we make a dough from hard red spring wheat and wash it several times to develop the gluten, and then dehydrate it to a powder. The starch that is rinsed out is used for other food products, and the water is recycled, as well.” The final product, vital wheat gluten or gluten flour, is 70 to 80 percent protein. Gluten flour mixed with water forms a stretchy mass made up of long strands of fibrous protein.

YUBA/TOFU SKIN/DRIED SOY MILK SHEETS: Just like cow’s milk, a potful of gently heated soy milk will form a skin on top. This phenomenon did not go unnoticed over the centuries, and Japanese yuba and other Chinese versions have long been commonplace all over Asia. For the Chicken Breasts recipe on page 28, you can use yuba to make a mock skin. The best way to do it is to make fresh yuba (Chicken Skins, page 30), but you can also buy dried or frozen soy sheets. Dried soy sheets, which must be soaked to rehydrate, are flat and kind of brittle, and it takes a bit of fussing to get them to wrap around the Chicken Breasts and get them to stay in place. Frozen sheets don’t require soaking, and they’re more flexible.