The secret weapons in my kitchen
What I keep at home to boost flavors and textures in my mostly plant-based cooking
I’ve been writing about wine recently because it was the season, but with all the moderation and resetting that January brought, I thought I’d switch gears to food, since in addition to being a good drinker I am also a very good eater. And I spent about five years working in professional kitchens before I moved into design work.
I stopped eating meat about 12 years ago, and after toggling a few different levers, have settled into a vegetable- and legume-rich diet that also includes eggs, fish and dairy (but not a ton of it). My choices have never felt like restrictions to me, and I focus on how much I do eat, rather than lamenting the absence of things I don’t. And yet. It’s true that sometimes you need to work a little harder when you’re cooking without meat and dairy since vegetarian and vegan meals can lack depth and richness.
So I’m going to unpack a few tricks and techniques for cooking without meat and dairy, why they work and how to use them when you’re cooking at home.
At the end I’ve got a list of staples should you want to stock your own pantry.
Before we dive in
I want to break down what I’m actually talking about here, which is how to create satisfying flavors and textures in your cooking, which is not the same thing as recreating or imitating meat and dairy since you need good flavors and techniques to make them taste good too. But they do have a few things going for them, namely fat and texture. In the flavor department, fat is really good at carrying flavors to your palate. In the texture department, meat and cheese have chew, that delightful yielding bounce that firm proteins create between our teeth. So when you’re cooking without them, you need to be more intentional about providing those elements.
Additionally, I tap ingredients with concentrated deep or sharp flavors to add depth, like tomato paste, fish sauce, caramelized onions, miso, roasted mushrooms and garlic.
The Secret Weapons
Soy Sauce & Vinegar
When I sous cheffed the Wild Kitchen popup, I stood over huge pans of unconventional ingredients – boar, wild nori, field fennel, nettles, nasturtium pods – learning how to make them sing in a restaurant kitchen. For our wild boar ragu, we deglazed the rondeau with glugs of soy sauce and sherry vinegar to make the sauce base, maybe some shakes of fish sauce, letting it cook down with the bronzed fond and fat of the boar meat. The result was a glossy and pungent base that anchored the ragu’s natural umami.
When I was cooking without meat at home, I started using this technique to make a bean soup or a rich tomato sauce base, deglazing deeply caramelized onions, garlic and mushrooms with liquid aminos and either sherry or red wine vinegar (my two faves for this purpose) before adding the rest of the ingredients. The soy sauce or aminos add salty depth, and the cooked-down vinegar adds a tang that balances the richness of any fats, resulting in a more dimensional flavor. Browning is also key to both flavor and texture, so I also make sure I’m getting deep color on my components – caramelized onions, crispy and dark brown fried egg edges, roasted mushrooms (trumpets are amazing at this).
Fried Capers, Onion Powder & Worcestershire Sauce
A few years later, I got a lot of practice (two years in fact) making 100% plant-based meals for about 150 people five days a week when I joined the in-house kitchen at Juicero. Oh Juicero, a zenith of Silicon Valley silliness. So much to say, but we did run a beautiful food program.
Leaving meat and dairy out meant we could buy very high-quality ingredients on a modest budget, so we had shelves of fresh mushrooms, dried mushrooms and mushroom powder, heirloom beans, Hodo Tofu, locally-made tempeh, any spice you could think of, any grain you could think of and gorgeous produce. And because plant-based founder bros all knew each other at the time, we got early prototypes of things like Impossible Meat before it hit the market (it blew my mind).
I brought the vinegar and soy sauce trick from Wild Kitchen and learned a hundred more ways to keep people from missing meat and dairy at breakfast and lunch. We used onion powder for concentrated umami, dried porcini powder for savory depth and made our own tomato paste by oven-roasting fresh tomatoes. We made cashew cream and vegan aioli for creamy bases and sauces, sometimes adding tapioca starch for a texture closer to cheese. We blended hemp seeds and pepitas into dressings and pestos. We blitzed Brazil nuts with salt and garlic in a food processor to make a crumbly pungent topping for pasta (vegan parm). We roasted the heck out of vegetables and made buckets of confit garlic. What these things had in common was salt, acidity, pungency and fat. That kitchen did not lack for fat, if you’ve ever mistakenly thought that a vegan diet would.
But one of my favorite things we did was shallow-fry tiny capers in olive oil until they were crispy and brown on the outside with their middles still tender, and added them to a vegan Caesar salad with fresh romaine and roasted carrots.
Do I love a caper? Unequivocally yes. But a fried caper is craggy, crunchy, briny, acutely salty and a little tart. After reserving some for topping, we would also blend them into the cashew cream base for the dressing, along with lemon, black pepper, garlic, sometimes smoked paprika and another secret weapon, Worcestershire sauce (it’s typically made with anchovies, but there are vegan versions, at Juicero we used one from The Wizards).
Miso & Pasta Water
Now at home, where I cook only for the enjoyment of myself, loved ones and friends, I keep my pantry well-stocked and labeled (once you work in a well-organized professional kitchen you cannot go back to unlabeled containers of random sizes and shapes).
My cooking is simpler, and my pots and pans are a lot smaller. But I have the same goal – satisfying meals with good flavor, balance and texture (in a future post, I’ll write about how texture is the most under appreciated aspect of satisfying food). In this more relaxed environment, I’ve experimented with miso. In marinades for tofu and sauces for noodles or wilted greens, or a dollop to finish soups and braised beans. In addition to deep saltiness, it has a silky texture. For its versatility, I most often have white or yellow miso in the fridge.
One of my favorite deployments of miso is in the NY Times’ Vegan Cacio e Pepe, which combines its earthy saltiness with cashew butter for its creamy fat and nutritional yeast for its tang and funk. And PASTA WATER. Leveraging the starch from the cooking liquid is a classic technique of Italian cooking because it brings together almost any pasta sauce.
Let’s Make a List
I’ve talked about a few things in detail, but if you’re stocking a pantry, I recommend keeping the following on hand. Combine these with fats for massive flavor bombs. Almost all are very affordable and have a long shelf life:
For flavor:
Tomato paste
Anchovy paste
Worcestershire sauce
Asafetida (aka Hing)
Fish sauce
Soy sauce or liquid aminos
Sherry vinegar
Red wine vinegar
Black vinegar (a treat)
Mushrooms (dried, fresh and powdered)
White/yellow miso
Capers
Onion powder
Nutritional yeast (I prefer the powdered version to the flaked since it blends better, so I order Frontier from iHerb)
For texture:
Coconut milk
Cashews
White beans (pureed)
Cauliflower (pureed)
Capers
Mushrooms
I buy many of these in bulk at Rainbow Grocery, where they are both higher quality and cheaper.
If you’re looking for direction on recipes or specific questions, leave them in the comments! Also, feel free to comment with suggestions for your favorite tricks and flavor-boosting pantry staples.
Hi, I’m Caetie Ofiesh and I’m a designer and project leader working in food and beverage, sustainable design and climate solutions. I’m also a good eater and a good drinker. I’ve worked as a professional chef, produced community-centered food events, designed food programs and commercial kitchens and written for food and wine clients.
I use this space to write about the good eating and good drinking that inspire my design work. Come see me at caetieofiesh.com.